
The two party system is killing our democracy - dangjc
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21075960/polarization-parties-ranked-choice-voting-proportional-representation
======
jkingsbery
> Understandably, many on the left believe the problem is simply the
> Republican Party, and if only Democrats could win decisive majorities,
> American democracy would work better.

I was waiting for a paragraph that started "On the other hand, many on the
right believe the problem is the Democratic party," or something to that
effect. The author says the problem is the two party system. I think this
article shows that the problem is that half the country pretends the other
half doesn't exist, and doesn't even bother addressing them, let alone
convincing them to change their minds.

~~~
nbardy
> let alone convincing them to change their minds.

This has become a growing issue in American politics. As much as a love
progressive politics myself. I can't deny the important of strong political
opposition and the importance of conservative view points in opposition to
progress.

Progressive politics has become ignorant to the people, and as a result the
people have turned a dead ear towards it. Instead of trying to convince them
of their new ideas and why they're better than the old ones. Progressives have
adopted an assumption of, "the other side is evil and is deliberately holding
us back".

It _should_ be hard to cause political change. Most new ideas in politics are
truly awful and failures at that level affect society gravely. Disagreement
over how to move forward is fundamental to a functioning democracy and the
emergence of good ideas. Yet modern politics seems to treat any amount of
disagreement as a solemn oath of obstinance. Yes, changing minds politically
is challenging, and yes it should be.

~~~
rayiner
> It should be hard to cause political change. Most new ideas in politics are
> truly awful and failures at that level affect society gravely.

Part of the problem is that the left has erased all evidence of the failures
of progressive politics (and in many cases the right has let them do so). When
you just hear about the civil rights movement and marriage equality, it’s easy
to assume that conservatives are just there to hold everyone back.

I’d offer three examples. First, “socialism.” Socialism failed dismally. One
of the most colossal failures of a political idea in modern history. So
progressives endeavored to replace “socialism” with “social democracy.” But
“social democracy” as practiced in Europe approaches the problem from the
complete opposite end. It abandons the socialist economic model and builds on
a capitalist one. Put differently, it’s not “socialism with more democracy”
it’s “capitalism with more democracy.” So progressives have turned social
democracy—which is more than anything an affirmation of the success of
capitalism, and an utter retreat from what progressives were pushing
before—into a win for progressivism.

The second is the sexual revolution. At least in the United States, we have
retrenched significantly on that front. Millennials start having sex later,
and have fewer partners. “Affirmative consent” has replaced “free love.” The
boundary-pushing on things like age have been pulled back hard. The #MeToo
movement reaffirmed conservative truths: men cannot be trusted and society has
a role to play helping women stave off unwanted and inappropriate advances.
(Andrea Dworkin addresses this at length in _Right Wing Women_ , though
obviously long before #MeToo. In explaining why many women continue to support
patriarchal systems, she notes that the sexual revolution stripped women of a
lot of protections that those systems used to provide, with nothing to replace
them. While Dworkin was obviously no conservative, she astutely recognized
that the progressive tendency to throw out rules can easily end up
overreaching. Many have lamented that the #MeToo movement is a return to a
more Puritanical approach. There is a lot of truth to that.)

Third, eugenics. The history of support for eugenics in this country has been
pretty much erased, even though the evils of Jim Crow get plenty of attention.
That’s likely because many progressives backed eugenics. Woodrow Wilson,
progressive champion, was a former New Jersey Governor and eugenicist who
segregated the federal work force for the first time. He fired existing black
federal employees (proving he wasn’t just a product of his time). Meanwhile,
one of the strongest opponents of eugenics was the Catholic Church. In 1930,
the Pope released an encyclical in which he condemned birth control, abortion,
and eugenics as all being incompatible with the traditional Christian view of
reproduction.

~~~
dariusj18
I know the whole post is about progressives "erasing" evidence of failures,
but your points don't make sense.

1\. Could you point to things to back up socialism failed dismally?

2\. At what point is affirmative consent anything similar to free love. Free
love should still be consensual.

3\. Eugenics is definitely a stain on progressivism, however I disagree that
that has been erased. There's plenty of evidence of the US being swept up in
the eugenics fervor.

~~~
rayiner
> 1\. Could you point to things to back up socialism failed dismally?

Literally every country built in socialist economic principles, I.e.
collective ownership of capital.

> 2\. At what point is affirmative consent anything similar to free love. Free
> love should still be consensual.

That’s an attempt to reformulate “free love” to fit modern sensibilities. Read
Dworkin’s contemporaneous take on the sexual revolution, starting at p. 89:
[https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010...](https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Right-Wing-Women-The-Politics-of-
Domesticated-Females-19831.pdf)

> In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and practice,
> neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an issue. It was
> assumed that — unrepressed — everyone wanted intercourse all the time

Affirmative consent is more than just “consent” (which too often turns into
“the woman didn’t physically resist”). Combined with #metoo, it narrows the
scope of sex to something shared between individuals under specific
circumstances under specific terms and conditions, and demarcates vast swaths
of human experience (like the work place) where discussing or propositioning
sexual activity is inappropriate. That’s a huge retrenchment from “free love.”

------
Finnucane
There are a lot of things that could be done. Electoral college voting is
required by the Constitution, but 'winner take all' apportionment by the
states is not; that is just imposed by the states to protect partisan results.
Can imagine what presidential campaigns would be like if candidates had to
actually campaign for every electoral vote in every state? The number of seats
in Congress has been fixed for 100 years, so we no longer have anything close
to equal representation by district.

~~~
khuey
Most things that could be done suffer from the problem that they require the
people who currently have power to disadvantage themselves.

Proportional allocation of electoral votes might be a useful reform (though it
could easily be gamed, if states were to follow Congressional District
boundaries you could gerrymander the Presidency) but if Texas and Florida
enact it while California or New York do not (or vice versa) it's a massive
gift to the Democrats (or Republicans).

Both the UK and Canada have recently failed to deliver proportional
representation despite explicit campaign promises because of this.

~~~
zamfi
No realistic scenario involves only some states doing this while others don’t,
though it’s worth pointing out that Maine and Nebraska are not winner-take-
all.

You may find the national interstate popular vote compact interesting. [1]
Basically each state in the compact pledges their delegates to the national
vote winner, _but only once enough states to guarantee the presidency have
agreed to do so._

That said, currently it seems that any “popular vote” measure that takes away
power from small states (like this one, or changing the senate or house) would
disadvantage republicans, so it’s probably a nonstarter.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact)

~~~
Analemma_
> That said, currently it seems that any “popular vote” measure that takes
> away power from small states (like this one, or changing the senate or
> house) would disadvantage republicans, so it’s probably a nonstarter.

This isn't actually true, for a couple reasons:

1\. Small states are already ignored in Presidential elections because most of
them are solidly red or blue (see [0] and note how many small states have no
visits at all). Pretty much the only small state that swings in elections is
New Hampshire, so I suppose New Hampshire loses a bit by transition to a
popular vote, but no other state really does. I'm prepared to bite that
bullet.

2\. Right now there are tons of suburban and rural Republicans in California
and New York whose votes essentially don't count at all in the current system,
but would in a popular vote.

People who have studied the potential effects of abandoning the Electoral
College have found that it doesn't actually provide an unbalanced benefit to
either party, though I concede that as long as Republicans _think_ it would
hurt Republicans, it won't happen.

[0]: [https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-
events-2016](https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/campaign-events-2016)

~~~
khuey
It would be a much different debate if Kerry had won Ohio (and thus won the
Presidency without winning the popular vote) in 2004 but at the moment the
Electoral College has given Republicans two of the last four elections where
they lost the popular vote so I don't think it's just _perception_ that it
would hurt them.

------
zakum1
South Africa has a proportional representation system for similar reasons - to
recognise plurality. It has some significant downsides. It weakens the ties
between a representative and a specific district / constituency. In exchange
it strengthens the hands of party decision makers who are the final brokers of
how seats are apportioned.

Having grown up in South Africa and having spent a reasonable amount of time
in the USA, I admire the local civic mindedness of American communities and
the accountability of the political representatives. I am also appalled by the
partisanship. I worry that proportional representation could make it worse.

~~~
dbingham
Propotional representation is not with out its problems, but I think given
that our current system has a bicameral legislature where one body (the
Senate) basically just represents entrenched power interests and is badly
divorced from the will of the people, and grossly unrepresentative (since it's
2 per state where states have differing populations), I think we could gain a
lot by making that body proportional.

Would it be perfect? Nah. Would it be -a lot- better than what we have? Yes.

With the Senate proportional party, and the House still geographically
representative, and then if you add in ranked choice voting, you could break
the two party system and have a much, much more representative government.

~~~
pessimizer
This the easiest and most realistic step in my opinion; the people lobbying
heavily to preserve the current Senate system would just be entrenched local
tyrants. I think the vast bulk of Americans would be swayed by the idea of
having at least one Senator who _almost completely_ shares their politics.

If the result is that the Senate becomes the most interesting and
representative body, gradually shift the bulk of power there on whatever
issues it's best at. If the result is that the Senate becomes a disaster,
abolish the entire body.

------
onychomys
The technical jargon for what the article is describing is Duverger's Law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law)

------
matttproud
Support [https://www.fairvote.org](https://www.fairvote.org). They are making
good progress on incremental but substantive reform.

~~~
sanxiyn
Ugh. They are advocating IRV, which is probably the worst voting method except
plurality.

~~~
abecedarius
It does seem bad; it's hard to say if it's even an improvement on net.
[https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-
vers...](https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/)

------
bryanlarsen
In my opinion, even better than multiple parties is no or weak parties. The US
used to have parties that were weaker than those in British parliamentary
systems. Most votes in a parliamentary system are "whipped"; members are
forced to vote along party lines. The US doesn't have whipped votes, but party
line votes have increased dramatically.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2017/12/13/a-gro...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2017/12/13/a-growing-
cancer-on-congress-the-curse-of-party-line-voting/#dcb565e6139c)

------
jfengel
While I favor proportional voting, I don't expect it to solve the problem
because the legislature still works on an all-or-nothing basis. A law either
passes or it doesn't. Adding more parties just tweaks the alliances and horse-
trading that have to be formed to reach the 50%+1 required for it to pass.
Those alliances have to be durable for the quids-pro-quo to work. You can call
those alliances parties or not, but they work in similar ways.

Any chance would tweak the existing sets of alliances, and that would a time
confuse and quite the partisanship. But sooner or later somebody is going to
realize that pledging fealty to each other is the best way to get their
personal priorities achieved. Partisanship happens because it's effective, and
encouraging more parties won't deter the fact that 50%+1 of the country can
shut the remaining parts out entirely.

Partisanship in the US these days has little to do with agendas and more about
identity. Elections have become more about shutting the others out of power. I
see that the article hopes that by introducing more parties, they can remove
the urge to see one other party as the enemy to be destroyed at all costs.

But I don't think it works. A variety of social and political factors have
pushed us here, and they won't be removed by rearranging the names of the
alliances. The causes run much deeper, and tweaks to the process won't do more
than confuse that for a while. So I'm all for proportional voting, or really
any change, just to give me a break from the constant drumbeat of animosity.
But I don't expect that break to last more than a few cycles, at most.

------
Symmetry
A potentially easier fix would be to roll back the changes made to the US
primary system in the 70s and go back to letting parties pick their candidates
internally rather than throwing it open to an electorate where only the most
partisan bother to vote in primary elections.

The old system had its share of problems but I think that, all in all, the old
smoke filled rooms worked better than what replaced them. Using approval or
ranked choice voting to have more than 2 parties would solve most of the
issues with the system anyways and we ought to do that as well but that seems
harder to get in place.

~~~
aaomidi
No thanks.

------
beagle3
Somewhat relevant:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law)
; It’s an observation about why e.g. Whole Foods and Trader Joe would have
branched next to each other, but also explains why in a two party system,
parties end up having very similar platforms in practice with respect to most
”sliding scale” issues, like war. (And then there’s the polarizing no-middle
all-or-nothing issues like abortion or immigration that are not addressed by
this explanation)

------
nkingsy
Is there a place I can donate to support an amendment?

I see this from a quick search:
[https://www.fairvote.org/donate](https://www.fairvote.org/donate)

~~~
Taikonerd
There are different "alternative vote" organizations, which have different
favored reforms.

FairVote is, indeed, the biggest advocate of IRV, and of multi-member
districts.

The Center for Election Science
([https://www.electionscience.org/](https://www.electionscience.org/)) favors
a switch to approval voting, and AFAIK doesn't have an opinion on multi-member
districts.

~~~
ClayShentrup
[https://www.electionscience.org/learn/library/proportional-v...](https://www.electionscience.org/learn/library/proportional-
voting-methods/)

------
jwlake
I'm always amused when people propose what the problem is and a fix for it,
and then they immediately think "congress" should do something about it.
Democracy happens at the state and city level. The federal government is
mostly ineffectual and not really the right place to do most things. If you
beleive in rank choice voting get your city to do it, then your county, then
you state. The federal government doesn't run elections.

------
jhoechtl
Put differently: Real change in such a voting system can only come by turmoil.
Like war. You shouldn't pray for that and vote for a change.

------
jccalhoun
The article doesn't seem to mention that on a state and local level the
republican and Democratic parties have conspired to pass laws that make it
harder for third parties to get on ballots. In many places third party
candidates have to get a lot more signatures than Republican or democratic
candidates which makes it harder for them to get on the ballot let alone
elected.

------
arexxbifs
As someone living in a multi-party system, I'd say the difference is probably
negligible. Having several smaller parties usually means the forming of two
political blocs, within which the different parties must get along reasonably
well while still trying to keep their constituents, which usually leads to
compromises nobody is really fond of.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"Compromises nobody is really fond of" is _normally functioning politics_.
What we have now is trench warfare. Normally functioning politics would be a
large improvement.

~~~
arexxbifs
I was trying to avoid hyperbole.

Trench warfare is certainly applicable to the situation here as well. We might
be lagging behind the US, but polarization is steadily increasing. Nobody
seems willing to address the real issues at hand. Instead people are arguing
semantics and calling each other nazis, and it's getting increasingly hard to
gather a majority for passing a budget, not to mention actually forming a
government.

I honestly don't think a handful more political parties will do that much of a
difference to combat the current zeitgeist.

------
ClayShentrup
Unfortunately the author doesn't have a good understanding of the process
required to end two-party domination.

[https://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-
voting/...](https://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/amp/)

~~~
AstralStorm
Does anyone? Is there a case where an entrenched two party system for broken
up?

------
RickJWagner
I was surprised to enjoy reading 90% of this article.

There was a little gratuitous Republican-bashing (it is Vox, after all), but
outside of one paragraph it was remarkably even-handed. I liked a lot of the
ideas presented, too.

I hope we do find a way out of the two-party gridlock.

------
hootbootscoot
Yeah, I get the gist of this, but I'll counter-propose: RANKED CHOICE VOTING
as the single most effective means of getting out of the various traps a 2
party system (among other things) creates.

~~~
ClayShentrup
No. You need score voting, STAR voting, or approval voting for that.

[https://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-
voting/...](https://asitoughttobe.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/amp/)

------
mindtricks
While I'm sympathetic to the author, we have a significant amount of history
showing that two parties work quite well. We certainly have our issues with
long-term thinking that's not helped by this system, but in general, America
is still doing quite well.

------
simonsarris
As long as parties are default opposed instead of default collaborative,
Democracy necessarily heightens group divides: Anyone who leaves your group
gives power to your enemy, so the enemy _must_ be demonized. Demonizing the
Outgroup is how you police Ingroup. This is true even in multi-party
democracies, though its not always as apparent.

(Of course, once you see someone demonizing you, there's very little choice on
your side but to fight them...)

> we now have... a _genuine two-party_

Okay, but how did we go from non-genuine-two-party to this so-called genuine
two-party? The policy proposals here are fine but they didn't exist in the
60's either. Something non-mechanistic changed.

I don't think its _exactly_ the two party system, but the concept of ideology
as an _identity_ that is the modern component of this problem. Rather than
dwelling in their own thoughts, being a human being, living and experiencing
things and gaining wisdom, people restrain all of their wisdom faculties with
these chastity belts of ideology. If ideology becomes one's identity, having
impure thoughts is not thinking, it is a blow to your sense of self and
therefore dangerous. In the political realm, it means that compromise simply
isn't possible in ways that it may have been 100 years ago. There's no "if we
get this, you can get that", ideology doesn't see differing people with
differing interests, it sees you — sacred, you could never compromise yourself
— and when it thinks about the obverse, it can only see an enemy.

Many willingly fit themselves into ideological categories that are quite
narrow, and by "identifying" with these labels, they are depriving themselves
of the contemplation and reflection befitting the question of a person's
identity. I wish for no one's life to be easily summarized by the contortions
of such machines, but many seem to welcome the labels. When you express
concern publicly that politics has taken over people's lives, this is fed into
the machines that have taken over, and they churn out their answer:
"Everything is political." You might ask them if they have the causality
reversed, but at that point you must wonder who, or what, you're having the
conversation with.

I've written about this before and I think this has been a long time coming by
the way, starting with the printing press which enabled massive one-way
communication over what came before it as the default, two-way communication.
(TConsider: Before the printing press, you talked to more people, perhaps in a
day, than you would read in a lifetime. Now it's the opposite, you will always
read/consume more media than talk to others, by a huge margin. This split is
imo not well understood). I'm not exactly convinced it can be defeated merely
with mechanistic changes to how voting and representation is done, though
that's sure to help, otherwise. The real problem is bigger, deeper, and much
more subtle.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I think the cause (or at least accelerating factor) may have been the end of
the Cold War. Before that, you had an identity: You were an American, and the
bad guys were the Communists. You were for freedom, and they were for tyranny.
After the end of the Cold War, we lost the external enemy that (for the most
part) united us.

~~~
AstralStorm
We could use a leader that attempts to stop the silent civil war that is this
sort of identity politics.

Unfortunately, current powers won't let them, and getting popular support for
this idea is hard when polarizing is so easy.

------
bassman9000
Or maybe we should fix the divide itself, given that the system has worked
reasonably well during 200+ years, more than most Western democracies

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-
unseen/201809/...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-
unseen/201809/why-has-america-become-so-divided)

 _But a 2012 study by Stanford University political science professor Shanto
Iyengar and colleagues offers another way of looking at this apparent split.2
It examined political polarization from a different angle — not from how
Americans stand on policy issues, but from the perspective of “affect” — how
they feel about those on the other side of the political fence. Drawing from
survey data spanning several decades, the study found that the feelings of
those who affiliate as Democrat or Republican towards members of the opposing
party have become increasingly negative since the late '80s._

 _Another study published earlier this year by Texas Tech University professor
Bryan McLaughlin provides additional insight regarding the contributing role
of the media in the political polarization of the country._

Media, and social media, have a lot to answer for.

EDIT: here's a CNN political analyst joking about a conversation he made up.

[https://twitter.com/joelockhart/status/1220064298925461505?s...](https://twitter.com/joelockhart/status/1220064298925461505?s=19)

Vox doesn't even remotely address any possible role they must have had in
furthering the divide. But sure they have solutions.

