
The Two-Party Swindle - splat
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mg/the_twoparty_swindle/
======
tokenadult
There is a problem with the submitted essay that is a common problem with many
essays on lesswrong: it writes about a matter that developed historically with
insufficient examination of the history of the matter. Maybe the people
submitting articles to lesswrong need to read more history more often.

The American two-party system is remarkable in how much the two parties do NOT
insist on long-term ideological consistency. Each party shifts its positions
and adds and subtracts party platform planks as new third parties introduce
net points of view into political discourse. The parties are stable because
their positions on issues are very unstable. If you compare the party
platforms of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to those of a
century ago, you will see on many issues a complete role reversal of the
parties. Similarly, which party is more favored by southern voters or which
party is more favored by black voters is far less stable than the general
tendency that black voters and southern voters only occasionally favor the
same party.

~~~
grandalf
that was not a cornerstone of his argument in the least. I wouldn't even say
it was a part of it at all.

~~~
tokenadult
How would you summarize his argument? Why did the title of the article refer
to two parties?

------
swombat
Excellent article, as expected for an Eliezer Yudkowsky article.

One place where it leaves me hungry... what can we do about this very real
problem? I understand that no single person can fix this all by themselves,
but is there some kind of action that we can take, when the circumstances
arise, that will help resolve this problem rather than help perpetuate it?

Edit: Additional note... this is one of the many reasons I like the Swiss
system. We vote on issues separately from voting on people. This has its
disadvantages, but at least it's direct democracy.

~~~
bokonist
Direct democracy does not solve the problem, see California. The Swiss cantons
work well because they are small. Direct democracy does not scale.

One of the best ideas for reform I've heard is the idea of unpredictable
elections, a la Venice. See:
[http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-
elect...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-
elections.html)

~~~
yummyfajitas
California is not quite a direct democracy. They have ballot propositions,
yes, but they also have a legislature almost as bad as the NY legislature, and
their state workers are completely unaccountable.

Arnold: Until the budget is sorted out, all state workers get minimum wage.

State workers: You can't do that. Besides, our computer are too old to handle
paying minimum wage.

[http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1132588.htm...](http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1132588.html)

~~~
bokonist
Right, but the limited direct democracy they have does not seem to make better
decisions than the legislature:
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/06/myth_of_the_rat_...](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/06/myth_of_the_rat_2.html)

------
kragen
The same thing happens between the armies of nations. Nation A's army attacks
the civilians and army of Nation B; Nation B's army attacks the civilians and
army of Nation A. Even though they're fighting each other, the civilians on
both sides are very similar to each other, and the war makes them all worse
off through taxation and slaughter.

The armies are also very similar to each other, in values and in training, and
very different from the civilian population. In fact, they probably trained
together in joint exercises or at WHISC before the war.

If you slice the identities one way, the attacks by the armies on the
civilians show that the armies are dangerous to the civilians, and therefore
civilians should endeavor to eliminate armies, as did the people of the United
States in the American Revolution, and as did the people of Costa Rica during
the previous century. But of course the more common way to look at it is that
the attacks by Nation A show the great necessity for the civilians of Nation B
to support the army of Nation B, in order to deter and defend against attacks
from Nation A, and vice versa.

So armies, as a class, whip up support for themselves by attacking and killing
the civilians whose support they depend on.

And so today in Israel and Palestine, each nation has strong popular support
for organized violence against civilians on the other side.

Of course, historically the connection between armies and governments is
extremely close.

Is there a way out? Are the Costa Ricans in imminent danger of invasion due to
their lack of armed forces? Having armed forces didn't seem to help the
Salvadorans, the Guatemalans, or the Nicaraguans when the US funded terrorist
campaigns against their people, didn't help the Panamanians or the Granadans
when the US decided to invade them, and didn't help Guatemala when the United
Fruit Company organized a coup. In fact, in most of those cases, the army
acted against its own people.

But would Honduras have avoided the Football War if they had had no army? Or
would they now be a province of El Salvador? Would Cuba be a territory of the
US, like Puerto Rico? (And would Cubans be better off if they were?)

------
johnnybgoode
This was better than I expected. Everyone here is already aware of the two-
party swindle (I hope), but the author describes it in a fresh way. He also
explains some of the reasons it happens, for people who know the swindle
exists but don't understand why.

Also, he rather subtly points out that we haven't actually dispatched of the
idea of people being _ruled_ by a separate class, contrary to what we're
taught in school.

~~~
tome
Even calling it a "swindle" is an example of this phenomenon. Why does it
necessarily have to be "the political elite"/"the ruling class" versus "the
disenfranchised populous"?

I'm sure a huge number of politicians are very frustrated by many of the
policies of their party and would like to diverge from them to a greater or
lesser extent. They are constrained too.

Why can we not see this as an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, with
little overall direction?

~~~
scott_s
That is how he presents it.

 _There doesn't have to be a conscious, collaborative effort by Your
Politicians and Their Politicians to keep the Voters screaming at each other,
so that they don't notice the increasing gap between the Voters and the
Politicians. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It emerges from the
interests of the individual politicians in getting you to identify with them
instead of judging them._

He calls it a "swindle" because whatever reservations politicians have with
their party, they all try to get you to identify with themselves.

------
sethg
The author seems to blame the two-party system and the class divide between
politicians and voters for the fact that nobody is shrinking the size of the
government.

I have a much simpler explanation for this phenomenon: no substantial body of
voters _want_ smaller government.

The clique of libertarians who actually believe in "smaller government" and
not simply "government taking less of my money in taxes and spending less on
the things that I personally don't like" is substantial on the Web and among
the intelligentsia, but not so much in the voting booth. Look at how poorly
Ron Paul did in the Republican primaries.

~~~
tc
Very few people want free markets. The rest just want the standard of living
that only free markets can offer.

~~~
MaysonL
And the few people who want free markets aren't willing to pay for them.

------
ckinnan
Ironically, the Founders didn't expect a role for political parties and most
were concerned with their rise.

"There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the
Administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the Spirit of
Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true--and in Governments of a
Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour,
upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in
Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their
natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for
every salutary purpose--and there being constant danger of excess, the effort
ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire
not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting
into a flame, lest instead of warming, it should consume."

GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address to the people of the United States, Sep.
17, 1796

------
lionhearted
At one point, I started making a list of all the decisions politicians could
make and change about the way governments were run. I came up with over 100
items, very quickly. The Democrats and Republicans both didn't address and
were in implicit agreement on some 95 of those 100 things, despite the fact
that some of them are really ugly. For instance, the exclusive rights to the
television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year
to NBC, CBS, and ABC, and estimates have placed the worth of those rights over
a billion dollars per year.

This made me sad.

~~~
barry-cotter
Blog it. Then submit it.

~~~
davidw
To reddit...

------
DanielBMarkham
This is good -- Eliezer? How come it took so long for this to get on the
board? Great article.

I thought this at first was a politics article, but for me, at least, it's a
much more practical one. Let me explain.

Working with large corporations, I've found that this is not restricted to
sports or politics. It happens between divisions, between business groups --
even between cliques of programmers on the same team. Politics is the ultimate
generalization of the problem, but it's a much more practical and immediate
matter.

I guess that's why I've never understood the fear of talking about politics on
HN. Heck -- you guys do it all the time. Every time there's an Apple vs.
Microsoft thread, or a Twitter vs. Blogging thread, or a functional
programming vs. imperative programming thread -- this is the same thing. It's
amazing people can't see it. You identify with a product, a brand, a group of
people, and then suddenly it's _us versus them_. We have our experts, our
slogans, our information sources. They have theirs. We can argue for years and
never do more than talking past each other, because _we've never generalized
the type of discussion we are having and worked at the meta level._

Where I think politics is more interesting is that _positions change month by
month_. That means that political party X may support something this month and
be against it the next month. In effect, it's a critical thinking test -- can
you identify your own bias? Because if you were arguing for something last
month and are arguing against the same thing this month, you might be
identifying more with a group that ideas. _It's much easier to spot this when
the positions keep changing_ , which makes a discussion of politics useful for
detecting personal bias.

BTW, it's also a quick test for thinking about other things too. If you're
meeting with a new person and they seem stuck on some political party thing,
you can bet they're going to be group-identifying with a lot of other things
as well. Different people have different levels of the need-to-identify. We
all know the worst ones: the people with bumper stickers all over their car,
various flag pins or whatever on their clothes, a rabid sports fan and a
sticking-to-a-political-party-no-matter-what attitude.

Solutions to the two-party swindle? Term limits (to prevent camping out in
office) Expiration limits for laws (to prevent get-what-you-can-now-attitude).
Some sort of push for a multi-party system.

Oddly enough, in the US at least the thought was that it would end up being a
dynamic system with small groups taking various positions and coalitions
changing over time. Instead that's not how it worked out.

Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about
tough topics with each other.

~~~
ggchappell
Ah, a thought-provoking comment.

> Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about
> tough topics with each other.

A fine idea. It gets tricky, however, because there is a difference between an
_individual_ learning and a _group_ learning.

Say you and I learn to have a reasonable discussion. That's great, as long as
we are alone in a room together. But put us in a crowd with an open mic, and
even if 99% of the crowd are mostly reasonable people, the remaining 1% can
still wreck the discussion. Especially because there is maybe another 5% that
can easily get their emotions aroused by the loony 1%. That, I think, is why
there is a fear of political discussion on HN.

Then, of course, there is the question of what to do about it. HN has made a
start; it's clearly one of the calmer places to have a public discussion on
the net. However, I rather doubt that opening up HN to political discussion
would work well. Sad ....

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Call me a believer in technology. I think this is a technical problem and not
an insurmountable one.

I also think it's the most important social problem facing technologists
today: how to dynamically and vigorously mix ideas on the internet without
chaos.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I don't think it is that kind of a technical problem. These are like
fundamental issues in human interaction. I don't think you can solve this
problem by coming up with a clever online community or interesting way of
visualizing data.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
But isn't the entire premise of representative democracy is that you can have
highly emotional factions and yet still have a productive conversation given
the appropriate framework? Aren't there lots of examples of teams with highly
divergent personalities and opinions that still manage to perform? In fact,
aren't those some of the highest performing teams?

In Hollywood there's a concept called "creative tension". You can look at it
as meaning "he's a jerk to work with" but there's a deeper meaning: from
wildly divergent creative styles comes the best product. As long as you can
set up the framework for productivity.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I'm not sure that the entire premise of "representative democracy" is that you
can have highly emotional factions and yet still ahve a productive
conversation ... I'm not sure where that language derives.I think it's not
that complicated: a representative democracy is simply democracy less a
people's majority rule.

Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart
enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-
simplistic terms.

As far as teams that have divergent personalities but still manage to perform,
it depends on what you mean. There's a lot of factors there.

My point was that there is probaby not some technology (at least non-
invase/non-mind-altering) that can solve problems of "group-think" or "us vs
them" or whatever kinds of problems. Even if you just look at how religion
affects politics, with the fairly reasonable assumption that you aren't going
to get rid of it, it seems hard to see how you would construct a technology to
solve such problems. I don't know what that would mean, really.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Fascinating comment.

 _Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not
smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least
non-simplistic terms._

Then why do people have the ability to vote? That's my point: from simple
people complex systems form and operate. To say that people are not smart
enough to run their own affairs is quite interesting. I'm not sure how to
reply to that.

But switching to the technology side, with the internet we already have some
examples of voting and filtering in action. For instance, there are probably a
thousand bad, emotional blog entries for each one that gets upvoted on HN.
It's just a matter of appropriate filtering and selection criteria.

Let's suppose instead of voting items up or down we categorize them by how
they emotionally affect the reader. Over time, the system could provide an
appropriate mix of interesting, insightful, and sometimes maddening material
for me to consume. My "tolerance level" would be determined by how emotionally
I responded to certain stimulus. The system would keep things emotional, but
not so much as to not have a cohesive discussion.

That's a broad outline of one solution. There are others.

~~~
bokonist
_To say that people are not smart enough to run their own affairs is quite
interesting. I'm not sure how to reply to that._

Say we converted social news sites into voting platforms. Would you rather be
ruled be Hacker News or Digg?

Votes are power, not freedom. I believe the average person is smart enough to
run his own affairs. I do not believe the average person is smart enough to
_run my affairs_.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
"I believe the average person is smart enough to run his own affairs. I do not
believe the average person is smart enough to run my affairs."

Neither do I. And I don't believe it is a matter of smarts. I don't believe
anybody should run my affairs, smart or not.

But that's a structural question: the limits of voting power. Can the majority
force the minority into slavery? Can the majority overtax the minority? Etc.
All great structural questions.

Or to put it in a non-political venue: should database designers have final
say over persistence mechanisms on a team? Should teams vote to decide what
they can accomplish by a milestone or should a few decide?

~~~
bokonist
Within a territory, you'll always have one actor who is the ultimate arbiter -
ie, the government. Ideally, that government would be a neutral judge who
simply enforces common law, and not a meddlesome theocrat who tells me how to
live. But what selection process is most likely to result in arbiter that
pleases you? Selection by Hacker News, or selection by Digg?

------
grandalf
the missing piece of the essay is the question of whether "political
entrepreneurs" should be considered legitimate.

Using group dynamics to achieve power is just a reality of human nature, as
Elezier points out.

But Elezier jumps from this fat to assume that we should then be concerned
about the unequal distribution of power between most people and the few
political entrepreneurs (aka "power seekers").

It's hard to argue that all power seekers are bad, even if all do use group
dynamics to gain and keep power.

So how to we determine which power seekers we consider legitimate?

------
kazuya
Seems the author carefully and intentinally avoid talking about religions.
Why?

------
Musashi
Party Politics and Partisanship are evil. Less interested in what is good for
the country and more interested in what will get them elected to POWER!

~~~
DanielBMarkham
It's not just party politics though. It's the predilection of people to form
up into groups and to identify with those groups even at the expense of logic
and reason. Party politics is just what you get when you do it at a national
level. It happens all the time all around you.

