GOP Behavior
Ezra Klein has some thought on the Republican Party.
Ezra Klein, writing in the NYT, suggests Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams. As usual, I have gripes about the headline, as, ultimately the party isn’t coming apart at the seams, insofar as it does control one of two chamber of Congress and recently held the White House. Still, it is clear, as McCarthy’s messy bid to obtain the Speaker’s gavel illustrates, that there are serious factions within the party.
In other words, I agree that the GOP is a bit of a mess internally. But, and this is more than a little important, it isn’t going anywhere. Indeed, it can continue to be fractious and messy and still find itself in control of the government. First, as I constantly note, our system produces only two viable choices, and that has a profound impact on voter behavior. Second, structural conditions in the EC keep the party competitive for the presidency, the structure of the Senate is wholly in their favor, and the general conditions of our electoral system give them a decent chance of controlling the House every two years.
I stress these points because no matter what else may be true about the Republican Party, it isn’t going away as long as the institutional parameters of American politics remain the same. Moreover, they are going to be in a position to control parts of the federal government for the foreseeable future.
Still, it is worth asking why they are having the problems they are having.
One of Klein’s three reasons for GOP messiness is as follows:
For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing and secularizing. The Republican Party, as an organization, mediates between these two wings, choosing candidates and policies and messages that keep the coalition from blowing apart.
I think this is correct and, further, suggestive that there are at least two parties within the GOP but that our institutions make it almost impossible to incentivize the party to break into more coherent collectives.
There is, however, nowhere viable for either wing to defect to, save oblivion. So they are going to stay together.
I think that this internal fracturing is at the core of the problem for the GOP. The business wing really does need something different than the ethnonationalist wing. As Klein notes in the piece, this can be seen on the immigration issue, where the Chamber of Commerce types want a cheap labor pool, but that not only can have profound impacts on rural economies, it runs right up against folks who distrust non-whites with different cultural backgrounds. Likewise, free trade and neoliberal economics create a clear division. And while both sides think deregulation and tax cuts are mutually beneficial, the reality is those things are far more useful to the business wing.
The other two issues Klein raises are anti-establishment sentiments in some parts of the coalition and the GOP’s need for an enemy. I find these to be more squishy and stylistic than the clear cleavage noted above.
I think the “enemy” thing is as much a product of our binary party structure and the notion of “negative partisanship” (i.e., as much voting against the other party as for one’s own side) is a well-known phenomenon. And I think it is less about enemies as it is about how the Cold War specifically calibrated our politics for roughly half of the last century.
So, I think his point about the Cold War is correct, but with some added caveats.
The defining consensus of the midcentury Republican Party was its opposition to the Soviet Union. “The Cold War was the engine driving the mainstream Republican Party to the left,” Gary Gerstle writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” “Its imperatives forced a political party that loathed a large centralized state and the extensive management of private enterprise in the public interest to accept these very policies as the governing principles of American life.”
I think we need to note that the Cold War was also a shared area of agreement between the parties, even if any given presidential candidate may have had different approaches. As I alluded to in a comment thread recently, there was less anti-immigration rhetoric in the Cold War period by Republicans because the idea that a bunch of people wanted out of Communist countries (or, really, anywhere) and into the home of the free fit the ideological narrative.
Now there is no such impulse and nativism, which existed prior to the Cold War as a major part of American politics, has reemerged. So, the shared goals of the Cold War helped there be some amount of common ground in American politics. The fact that the USSR truly did pose an existential threat to the USA meant that at least some parts of our politics were based on shared self-interest. So, the Cold War affect more than just the GOP.
Still, I think that Klein’s citation of Gerstle does hold some GOP-specific significance as well.
Gerstle’s point here is subtle. Anti-Communism made Republicans more than a purely anti-government party. Liberals sometimes frame this as hypocrisy on the part of Ronald Reagan and other self-styled conservatives — how can you hate government but love the military? — but in Gerstle’s view, fighting Communism kept Republicans committed to a positive vision of the role of government in modern life. It turned tax cuts and deregulation into questions of freedom. It turned highway construction into a question of national defense.
And so it’s no surprise that you first see today’s Republican Party — complete with government shutdowns, doomed impeachment efforts, bizarre investigations and vicious congressional infighting — in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had fallen. Then came George W. Bush, and his initially listless administration, which was revived by Al Qaeda — another external enemy that lent focus and coherence to the Republican agenda. But that faded, too. And as that faded, the trends of the Gingrich era took hold. The enemies, again, became Democrats, the government and other Republicans.
And, of course, if government is the problem, it makes being a party serious about governing a hard thing to accomplish.
I do recommend the entire column.
I see I wasted half an hour excerpting Klein in the Forum.
I see the need for an enemy as pretty basic, and a deep cleavage. OK, it’s stoked by our two party system, but the GOPs are our conservative party and psychologically, conservatives need an enemy. If one, Russia, is not at hand, one, woke, must be invented. And Klein is clear that for the MAGAs, the enemy is the REPUBLICAN establishment. A contradiction many observers fail to note and Ds seem unable to exploit.
MAGAts have been mobilized over ‘87,000 IRS agents.’ They’ve got retirees in trailer parks worrying about audits that would have zero effect on them and are clearly aimed at higher income individuals. Proof that the MAGAts can still be used by big money to act against their own interests and in support of the rich.
I’ll be interested to see how the Ukraine issue plays out. The defense industry – old GOP – is obviously loving the war and hoping to build many more missiles and tanks and whatnot. The defense hawks ditto. But MAGAts love Putin because Putin supported Trump and hates gays. I expect this will create a mini-fracture but in the end Ukraine will get its toys in a bipartisan deal.
No part of business hates gays, business sees everyone as a customer and gays buy things. MAGA does hate gays. No part of business (outside of baby formula bottlers) hates abortion. MAGA does hate abortion. Public-facing business like, say, Starbucks or Amazon or Apple veer Democratic for this and other reasons. Discrimination by race, sex, religion etc is not good business for retail companies. MAGA terrorism, instability, hate, all the things loved by MAGA are either irrelevant to, or antithetical to, business.
So, 1) I am not convinced that the GOP can square this circle, and 2) I think the love from retail businesses will be returned by the Democrats who will become less reflexively anti-business. So, conclusion: not at all sure the MAGA/Money union will survive. If Dems are smart (never a safe assumption) the GOP may well fracture further and even split.
@Michael Reynolds:
I wish the Democratic Party would quit the “though we disagree, we all want whats best for America” BS and start openly portraying the Republican party of having been infiltrated by Russian agents who want to turn the country into a Russian puppet state.
To beat my dead horse, I’ve yet to see any evidence that the fundamental cause of this rift is our two party system. To me it is obvious this is not a battle between different philosophies on how to achieve more effective governance but rather between factions that espouse completely incompatible views of what government is for. On the one hand is a group that believes the primary purpose is to efficiently provide for the common good and to defend the rights of the individual. The other side believes the primary purpose is to benefit a few wealthy and powerful individuals and do so by imposing a class system and enforcing it through governmental authority and mob violence. There is no “middle ground” or “third way” between these. It’s a battle we must fight and I am truly not sure which will win the day.
Steven, I know you hate when I bring up Israel, but there is no better example of the exact same dynamic wherein one side believes the government should be about services and safety and security and the other believes the most important role for the government is to enforce an apartheid system, and one not just between Jews and everyone else but that also explicitly ranks certain Jews as “more Jewish” than others and therefore are given more authority. And it is also glaringly obvious that the number of political parties has only exacerbated these issues. I could make the argument that if Israel were structured so as to yield only two parties the fanatics and thugs would not have been able to achieve dominance over explosive areas of governance, but I don’t believe that. Israel must resolve this battle, just as we must have our battle between our two forms of governance.
I like Klein a lot, but he does have blind spots.
How can one write about the state of the GoP without mentioning the state of the “conservative movement” and specifically the breakdown of fusionism that held it together for so long?
At least he touches on the realignment of politics generally (which I think does not get enough attention), and related factors, but doesn’t really explain why Democrats have better managed this shift than Republicans.
And I have to object to this as usual:
The present conditions aren’t written in structural stone. The asymmetry of the EC and Senate has always been there, the only thing that has changed are the various political realignments that have now placed Democrats at a disadvantage. And those changes weren’t the product of structural deficiencies, but how the parties have evolved over time and what constituencies they get their support from. Democrats dominated the House and Senate for close to a century and now they don’t due to changes in the composition of the parties, not for structural reasons.
But there have been several periods where one of the parties was shut out of power for a fairly long time: the 24 years of Republican presidents starting with Lincoln; the 20-year FDR-Truman period; the 40 years the Dems continuously controlled the House. Something like that ought to happen to the Republicans today, but we know it won’t anytime soon. For all their problems and dysfunction, they remain popular among close to half of the electorate. And since most states are either overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democratic, there’s little room for growth. To me, the biggest implication of 2022 wasn’t that they overreached with Dobbs or nominated terrible candidates–though those are no doubt important factors–but that the current electorate is stagnant, like a mostly-used-up tube of toothpaste. This was a cycle dominated by lack of change more than anything.
And even when looking at the historical examples, it’s hard to see an analogue today that would allow anything comparable to the big realignments. Despite the so-called “smoke-filled rooms,” the parties used to be much more decentralized in terms of the voting blocs–that’s how you could have Southern racists coexisting in the same party with blacks and civil rights activists. And I don’t think the problem of misinformation is necessarily worse today than it was back then. It’s just that it used to be more localized. Today, we have all these niches and bubbles, but at a global scale–the Hunter Biden stuff or CRT is only compelling to those who seek it out, but it’s pretty uniform across the country; whether you’re in New York or Idaho (or even London, for that matter), if you’re a righty you’re going to wind up parroting that stuff because that’s what you’re being fed. Whether a state is blue or red pretty much just comes down to who outnumbers whom–there’s nothing more to it. And the only way out of this spiral is waiting till the crazies die out and the progressive younger folks increasingly enter the electorate. Until then, we’re going to have to stick it out for as long as we can. There will be no sudden realignment.
@Stormy Dragon:
I’ve done my part. The reason this fails to gain traction is that it’s so preposterous. And yet, it’s true. People are not built to handle the out-of-the-ordinary.
@MarkedMan:
It’s the difference between, ‘power over,’ and, ‘power to.’ They want control, especially over anything sexual. They believe it would be a better world if everyone conformed to their religious point of view. They could easily be 16th century Roman Catholics. We know it all, now do as we tell you and no one gets hurt.
We, more or less, are trying to make the world a better place by helping people to stay alive, be housed, be treated, be fed, be educated. We are more small ‘d’ as well as large ‘D’ democratic. They impose and punish, we liberate and educate.
My ongoing beef with (some not all) progressives is that they too often take the top-down, listen to the lecture and conform and no one gets hurt stance, rather than the old-school liberal approach of, ‘here’s some food.’ I think Dems are far better off talking about, and legislating on, things which tangibly help real people – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, housing assistance, legal representation, workplace safety, safe drinking water, education support, etc… Where we get beat up is crime and immigration. People need to feel safe, and if people are to think of themselves as a country they have to feel they have some control over the defining borders of that country.
You left out SCOUTS, which the GOP controls utterly and wll for a generation.
@Andy:
It always comes down to the people, those damn unknowable, unpredictable people. I never take too seriously any attempt to create a grand unifying theory of humans. I can’t answer the philosophical question of whether or not we have free will, but I can state definitively that it is not possible for us to behave as if we lack free will. You can mostly anticipate what people will do, then, suddenly, no you can’t.
Ukraine should have lost, we all thought Ukraine was going down, by all logic, by all the theories of the most read-in, they should have gone down. But some short Jewish comedian said, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” and the butterfly’s wings set in motion something surprising across Europe and the US. History is turning on this.
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. . .” It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes the whole world turns on a well-chosen phrase spoken by the right person in the right place at the right time. There is no system, nor will there ever be, that can figure that out.
@Kylopod:
I’m not sure that popular is the right word.
Many people understand there are only two viable choices, so they hold their noses and vote for the lesser evil or against the party they really don’t like. The fact that somewhere close to 2/3 of the public wants a third party is one of several data points that show the level of support for the existing parties is thin.
And really, that’s what one should expect from trying to cram a diverse nation of 340 million people into a binary political choice. Countries a fraction of our size and much more homogeneous populations have multiple viable parties to represent their people’s interests. If we changed to a system that supported multiple viable parties, the GoP and Democrats would be rumps of what they are now.
@Michael Reynolds:
The only quibble I have with this is most, if not all, of “Business” desperately hates its own employees. I’m sure Bezos, Musk, and Howard Shultz dream of filling a swimming pool with their employees and then electrifying it. Tim Cook would absolutely murder every single queer Apple employee if it would save him a dollar. Henry Ford was an absolute garbage human, but even he knew you had to pay your employees enough to buy your crap.
@gVOR08: Apologies-while I often at least skim the open forum, I didn’t today.
@MarkedMan:
I am not sure I have made a claim that the two party system, in and of itself, “caused” anything.
I am not sure what “this rift” necessarily means.
I will say that definitionally, if the system forces all politics into two camps with very little ability to shift away from those two, that might be problematic if, in fact, there are more than two cleavages in the society.
@MarkedMan:
It’s not that I hate it. It is that there is such a yawning chasm between rigid bipartism and the very specific kind of fragmentation in Israeli parties produced by their system, that I would argue you aren’t making the counter-argument that you think you are making.
@Andy:
I would argue you treat all of this is far more static that has been.
1. The House hasn’t expanded in 100 years—but the population has tripled. That has created the problems in EC and in House elections.
2. The expansion of the country (in terms of adding states) coupled with the way the population has grown at differing rates in different places has exacerbated the Senate’s structural problems.
@Steven L. Taylor: In other words, the asymmetry in the EC and Senate have not been static artifacts of our politics that have just been managed differently.
The asymmetry has, in fact, gotten worse and that has had important ramifications for the quality of democratic outcomes and processes.
@Mike Schilling: And SCOTUS will have generational conservative lean because of the issues with both the Senate and the EC.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Dead on.
@Andy:
The rigid two-party duopoly has been with us…well, at least as far back as the birth of the Republican Party in the mid-19th century. Yet we haven’t seen the current level of polarization until now. Today, there’s very little swing-voting or ticket-splitting, the majority of states–hell, the majority of counties–always vote overwhelmingly for one party. It’s basically a 21st-c. phenomenon (look at the wild swings during the latter half of the 20th-c.), and it’s increased as the century has gone on.
So I have trouble accepting that Americans as a whole are yearning for a different party. They may say it in polls, but they don’t really believe it. I think a lot of the so-called negative partisanship comes down to rationalization due to the information bubbles people are ensconced in. Do you know how many times I have heard people in right-wing media say stuff along the lines of “It’s not about politics, all Americans of good faith should be outraged by”–say, Hunter’s laptop, massive voter fraud, grooming drag queens, etc.? Part of the way these spaces work is that they present a version of reality that reinforces their worldview in such a way as to mask the ideological message. That’s why they get all those fake lefty renegades like Greenwald or Gabbard. As a result, a lot of righties think of themselves as ideologically neutral (I’ve run across this many times) despite believing the most wacko things.
This isn’t entirely new to this century–stuff like the welfare queens was a precursor. What’s changed is the growth of right-wing media (including social media), and with it the increasing rejection of mainstream sources of information by the right. Also, the departure of the South and rural areas from the Democratic Party–a process that’s been going on gradually since the mid-20th century and was probably more or less completed with the 2014 midterms–has led to a kind of maximal partisan sorting along these lines.
People may not be satisfied with the parties they vote for (I sure as hell am not), but far more of the American public are committed to these parties than was the case in the past–regardless of the way they explain or rationalize that commitment.
@Steven L. Taylor:
And there’s the rub. I think that there is essentially one overarching cleavage in our society, between the value system espoused by the slave-holding and then, extremely reluctantly, non-slave but Jim Crow governance of the Deep South that has taken over the Republican Party, and the democratic (small D) impulse to lift everyone up. I can’t see why more parties would change the battle lines and I strongly suspect that, as in Israel, the worst impulses would be empowered by such a change.
@Steven L. Taylor: And I would point out that you have made vague claims that Israel’s form of governance is fundamentally different than, say, Sweden’s, but have never explained why that is. For my part I think it has more to do with national consensus. If there is a general agreement about the aims of governance then it makes sense that more parties may (may!) yield better governance. But in Israel and today’s US there is no such consensus. The battle lines are such that we are in a war between a society based on 15th century views of social hierarchy battling against a post enlightenment governance.
@MarkedMan:
Michael touched on this (thought I’m not entirely aligned with his take), but I think you’ve misconstrued “the other side”. The other side — the ones who vote en masse — doesn’t consciously want to benefit any wealthy and powerful individuals. They have been tricked into doing so by appealing to their much more fundamental desires, which are (1) to impose their own narrow parochial morality on everyone else, (2) to ensure that their racial inferiors stay in their place, and/or (3) to have everyone acknowledge that they are victims. Individual voters are swayed in differing proportions by those 3 motivations, but they are necessary and sufficient to GOP electoral success.
You can get Republicans to vote for oligarchy by promising them an end to latin-american immigration, or to vote for racism by promising them Christian theocracy. You can get Republicans to vote for money-is-speech by promising to bring coal and manufacturing jobs back to the rust belt and Appalachia.
There’s a reason Republicans oppose any policy that would genuinely improve education.
@Steven L. Taylor:
1. I’ve been on record here many times supporting and explaining House expansion – it’s one of my soap boxes, one that is not discussed sufficiently IMO compared to fantasies like abolishing the Senate or packing the court.
2. I think you should flesh out this argument. We haven’t added a state in a very long time. What is the nature of the exacerbation exactly?
What asymmetry?
@Kylopod:
I don’t think that’s true. Rather, we had a period of relative comity after the Great Depression and WWII, arguably an aberration from the historical norm.
And secondly, most of the polarization is with elites and political hobbyists. Most of the country doesn’t care enough about, or even follows, politics to be passionately on one side or another.
I don’t know what you hear, but the only place I hear people talk about that sort of specific outrage on anything is online.
Most people are busy with their lives and aren’t part of these “spaces.” Most people don’t pay attention to politics. Cable news, collectively, reaches maybe 2-3 percent of the population across all the channels, right and left.
Then what explains the increased dissatisfaction with the parties, which is at a historic high?
@DrDaveT: I actually think you are giving too much credit to the great mass of voters. 60-80%, as Dr. Taylor points out, simply vote in the wave of those around them. For my part, I don’t think it is worthwhile trying to factor them in. Steven believes that more parties will entice them, but I think more parties will simply empower the 10% of the 15% who actually affect the vote.
@MarkedMan:
You mean, the people who actually elect people? I’d think they are the only ones who matter, in the end.
That’s not how it works. They go into polling stations and vote on their own. What motivates them to do that, and to vote as they do? I think you’re being overly simplistic if you think it’s “well, my neighbors say they’re going to vote for X, so I will vote for X.” Why are they voting for X? See my previous post.
In our current situation, it’s not about which candidate the people agree with — it’s about which potential voters are is sufficiently motivated/upset/anxious/proud to go out and make the effort to vote. What motivates those 60% to 80% who aren’t political junkies to do that? It ain’t theory, or philosophy, or public spirit.
@Andy:
The bottom line remains, as I am so desperately trying to get across, the structure of the system provides essentially zero incentive for third-party formation. Zero. Electoral rules matter.
And count me in the 2/3rd who want more parties, but also count me in with most voters that I know my options are D or R and that if I vote third party, I might as well be voting for the opposite of what I want.
@MarkedMan:
Not so vague, really, as I have noted very specifically that Israel’s national electoral district to elect the Knesset creates an especially fragmented party system. Sweden’s system, while proportional, is not as fragmented. I don’t think it is so much that I haven’t tried to explain some basic differences, either I am not doing a very good job or perhaps you aren’t seeing what I am trying to show.
And yes, national political issues are relevant. Institutions aren’t everything, but the way a fight is structured, matters. When there are only two parties, all politics can become zero-sum. If there were four parties or five, there would be some room to negotiate which simply cannot happen with only 2 interlocutors.
And our system is made worse when one of the two parties can dominate outcomes without even being able to command majority popular support.
@Andy:
The asymmetry of representation in the Senate and EC. Over time it grows and changes based on how states grow.
When California was admitted to the union in 1850, its population was around 92,000
When Wyoming was added to the union in 1890, its population was around 61,000
Not that radically a different representational landscape in terms of the Senate or the EC. And because we haven’t increased the size of the House, there are representation distortion there as well.
But we know that in 2023, those numbers are radically different. The asymmetry grows.
I was using your language, as @per the above:
I mean, this statement is simply wrong. While, yes, the asymmetry of the EC and Senate have been there since the beginning, they have both gotten demonstrably worse over time because of how we added states and how populations in the states in general develop.
What if the west coast was broken into much smaller states, as is the case on the east coast? That, by itself, would change the Senate and EC because of where the lines are drawn, and how many lines there are.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Probably a dead thread, but what the heck…
I don’t get what you are driving at here. Your contention has always been that systems that offer easier party formation are better. Shouldn’t the ease of party formation in Israel make it better than Sweden by your metric? Perhaps you are saying that is true only up to a point, i.e. there can be too much of a good thing? If so, what is that point?
@Steven L. Taylor:
I agree with the EC for the fact the House has not increased in size – again, that’s something I get on my soapbox constantly.
But have you actually run the numbers for the Senate? The population ratio between the smallest and largest state today is far less than at many points throughout US history. If you’re going to claim the asymmetry is worse, then let’s see the numbers that inform that conclusion.
I’ve looked at the numbers and concluded, somewhat to my surprise, that it is not worse. I’ve posted them here before, but here they are again.
Here is the population ratio between the smallest and largest state over the last century:
2020: 68.5:1
2010: 66.1:1
2000: 68.6:1
1990: 65.6:1
1980: 58.9:1
1970: 66.4:1
1960: 74.2:1
1950: 92.6:1
1940: 122.3:1
1930: 138.2:1
1920: 134.2:1
1910: 111.3: 1
California today is big and Wyoming is small, but the relative difference, if you care comparing the asymmetry of Senate representation, is in line with what it has been for the last half-century and is much less asymmetric than the first half of the 20th century.
So again, where has the asymmetry increased in your view?
@Andy: Do you not see how the asymmetry between WY and CA, as two examples only, has changed over time?
You assert that nothing has changed. The CA to WY example shows that it has just in that pairing.
I will try to address this further over time.
@MarkedMan: I wrote a lengthy response that my computer ate and that I cannot retrieve. I will try and summarize.
1. I have never, ever said that more parties, for the sake of more parties, is my goal.
2. I have noted, on multiple occasions, that too much fragmentation, such as in Israel, is a problem.
3. I have noted my preference for MMP, and have noted it tends to produce a few largeish partie and several smaller ones, but nothing like Israel.
I will try, as I always, to better explain myself. But I also would note that I don’t think you understand some of my claims about electoral rules and how parties work in coalitional settings as your sometimes very certain argumentation would suggest you do.
Short version: it isn’t that want more party because “more parties good.” I think it is empirically and normatively true that our current system is inadequate in its representativeness and that various aspects of our system would function better if our party system did a better job of providing representational pathways for citizens.
@Andy:
A lot of that had to do with the politics of the South. After Reconstruction, as part of their massive program of racial disenfranchisement, the Dems created an effective one-party state in the region. In the years following the Depression, the Southern Dems were so different ideologically from Dems elsewhere in the country, they frequently joined forces with Republicans on domestic policy, creating the so-called “conservative coalition.” Whenever pundits wax nostalgic about the bipartisanship of the postwar years, they are usually forgetting the cause and the ugly history behind it. Part of the current polarization is a result of the departure of the South from the Democratic Party. It’s probably the main cause of the ideological sorting of the parties–back in the mid-20th century the statement that the Dems were a party of liberals and the GOP a party of conservatives was much less clear.
Even if we look strictly at the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Depression, there may seem to have been polarization similar to what we see today, but it was actually a very different situation. The South voted Democrat as a bloc, but this was a result of apartheid-like policies, not natural voting patterns. Outside the South, the states were more volatile. It mattered greatly where a candidate came from, and states also responded to local issues a lot more than is the case today. One of the major features of today’s politics that is almost entirely unprecedented is the collapse of regional politics, and the nationalization of everything.
@Steven L. Taylor: I think the reason we get crosswise is that you often bring up the difficulty of new party formation in the US when we are discussing some other issue and it sounds, to me at least, like you are saying that the issue would be mitigated by having more parties. While it may be true, I don’t see an real evidence for it.
On your comment about the benefits of mixed member proportional representation, in looking at the Wiki entry for MMP I see the countries that currently have it in some form are:
Albania
Bolivia
Ethiopia
Germany
Korea
Lesotho
New Zealand
Romania
South Africa
Thailand
United Kingdom
Venezuela
I’m hard pressed to look at that list and say that the fact that they are based on MMP is an indicator for good governance. I’m not naive and I don’t expect that any system of governance will yield uniformly effective and fair governance, but this list is all over the map! (No pun intended)
@Steven L. Taylor:
Wyoming became the least populous state in the 1990 census, edging out Alaska. Look for yourself at the population ratio since then – it hasn’t changed much and is much less bad than in the early 20th century.
Why is CA-WY more relevant, and more problematic than the much larger disparities in the early 20th century?
I look forward to it.
@Kylopod:
Let me put it this way – I think polarization is different today, but not worse. For all the vitriol we have, most of it exists performatively online between political hobbyists. Political violence, for example, continues to be at historic lows. Talk, as they say, is cheap. I will start becoming more concerned about this when people take more action in the real world.
@MarkedMan: Most of them aren’t even functioning democracies, so that makes them problematic. The only Germany and NZ are especially good examples.
I do not know where there UK uses MMP (not to elect parliament, I assure you),
Korea actually has MMM, but that shows the limitations of Wikipedia.
What frustrates me about these conversations is that you want to challenge me on my area of expertise without really engaging in what I am saying. The notion that electoral system X equal good governance is not my claim, and never has been.
At some point, it seems that if you have to search Wikipedia to decode what I am saying, that maybe I deserve a bit more benefit of the doubt than you are giving me. Isn’t that at least kind of fair?
And sure, it also means I need to better explain myself, but I do try!
Nor have I ever claimed that more parties is the simplistic goal.
@Steven L. Taylor: Ah, rereading the Wikipedia article, “UK” was a heading and it is the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments that use MMP.
I’m a bit baffled by this statement:
Assuming that you are not being pedantic about “equal”, since I attempted to make it clear in my remarks above that I wouldn’t expect any governmental system to automatically ensure good governance. But in the past you have said I was incorrect when I inferred you were saying that simply offering more choices in and of itself was a good thing. You reinforced that above when you said that the Israel system is problematic because it makes it leads to to many parties. Yet you also say that the goal of having more parties isn’t that it yields better governance.
So what exactly is the benefit of having more parties? Also, do you actually disagree with my premise, “More party choices may be good in and of itself, but it doesn’t seem to lead to more effective and fairer governance in any significant way”?