

Democracies with two major parties invariably promote discrimination and brainwashing. - amichail

I find it amazing that people, particularly in the US, identify themselves as liberal or conservative.  Why should people agree on a seemingly arbitrary set of issues?<p>My guess is that they do not, at least initially.  But they do associate themselves with the party on which they agree on the most important issue to them.  Agreement on remaining issues then comes as a compromise.  But I think it becomes worse than that.  After a while, people start agreeing on issues that they would not agree on otherwise.  For example, religious conservatives who identify themselves with the Republican party may not initially agree with the party's policies on the environment.  So this is a form of brainwashing.<p>But there's also discrimination.  Democracies with two major parties tend to divide their populations into two, thus resulting in unwarranted assumptions and discrimination. <p>Having said this, there are probably important reasons why many countries end up with only two major parties.
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nostrademons
This is true, and an astute observation. It's also unavoidable - or at least
one of the better alternatives.

Everybody has their own ideas of how things _should_ be. In a society of 300
million people, that means 300 million different ideas. There will be some
overlap, but obviously they won't _all_ think the same things - then they'd
_really_ be brainwashed.

Unfortunately, there's only one way that things actually _are_. So somehow
you've got to condense the myriad of different cultures, beliefs and desires
into a single reality. Governments have relied on various ways of
accomplishing this:

1.) Kill everyone who doesn't agree with the "official" culture. Eg. Rwanda,
Bosnia, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, U.S. conquest of Native Americans

2.) Kill the most vocal proponents of alternate viewpoints, enough to
terrorize the remaining citizens into keeping with the party line. Eg. modern
Russia, several South American governments, apartheid South Africa

3.) Convince the population that eternal damnation awaits anyone who disagrees
with the party line. Eg. the Catholic Church

4.) Split the population into many little populations, each of which can have
their own reality. Eg. former Yugoslavia, former Soviet Union, American Civil
War, Roman Empire. Problem with this is that each sub-state _still_ wants to
impose its reality upon its neighbors, so you often get continual warfare
until one gobbles up the others.

5.) Convince a majority of the population that they really agree with you.
This is the "discrimination and brainwashing" you refer to.

6.) Develop some fundamental principles that everybody agrees on, then agree
to disagree on the specifics, knowing that eventually reality will come swing
your way. Eg. the Enlightenment theory behind liberty and democracy

#6 seems to be the ideal, but it requires some cognitive dissonance, namely
the ability to say "I disagree with what you're doing, but will defend your
right to do it." Most people are not capable of this kind of cognitive
dissonance - either they slip into "I will not defend your right to do this"
and end up with #1 or #2, or they slip into "I agree with what you're doing"
and end up with #5.

So #5 is the most stable system that a large civilization can enter. Most
Western democracies actually function as a combination of #5 and #6, with the
masses adjusting their beliefs to fit their leaders and the leaders themselves
agreeing to disagree under fundamental principles. U.S. democracy is currently
in danger because a disturbing number of "leaders" (on both sides) are
suggesting #1 or #3, but the political party system is meant to encourage #6.

Incidentally, the same problem happens with multi-party governments. Most
multi-party systems are actually run by coalitions, where a bunch of parties
get together and say "Okay, I don't totally agree with all of your viewpoints,
but for the sake of getting things done I'll let you do things your way."

------
epi0Bauqu
There are at least two separate questions here: 1) why does the US have only
two major parties; and 2) given such, why do people often pick one and stick
with it for all issues?

The first has been studied to death. It has to do with more with how the US
government is set up and less with the psychology of its people. There are
other countries with different setups that are not two-party dominant. One
viable way out of such dominance is some form of party-list proportional
representation (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-
list_proportional_represe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-
list_proportional_representation)) .

The second is all about psychology, it most certainly has several components
at play. I posit the most prevalent are attitudes of commitment given the
initial choice of party and some form of path of least resistance.

The former is common in psychology. It is a natural instinct to think your
group is better as soon as you join it, for whatever reason, even an arbitrary
one. This even happens in psychology experiments when groups are assigned
randomly.

The latter reason is simply most people don't research any issues nor do they
want to. They go with perhaps the simplest method to decide, which is listen
to what the group told me before. There is some real trade-off here. To be
fully informed is perhaps impossible. You need some sort of proxy for most
policy issues. Blindly following one of two major parties (on the other
extreme) is probably not the answer either of course.

------
clay
I would like to introduce to this thread a book that recently came out called
Myth of the Rational Voter. Byran Caplan argues that voters on the whole make
irrational decisions and even lists 4 specific "biases" that voters suffer
from.

Here's a podcast that explains the book:
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/06/caplan_on_the_m.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/06/caplan_on_the_m.html)

------
mynameishere
Institutions, unlike people, can be truly idealistic. No NRA member is 100
percent devoted to guns. The NRA itself, however, is 100 percent so devoted.
This same thing is possible with political parties. For instance, the
"Nationalists" or "Communists" or "Fascists" or "Libertarians" can be counted
on (to a large degree) to adhere to their platform.

In parlimentary systems, ideological parties, like the above, can get
represented, and often make up the shaky coalition goverments that hold power.
With the right kind of backstabbing, Nazis or Bolzhevics can wipe out their
allies from within and seize control. Just not possible in the US...

In the US's winner-take-all system, the parties themselves must compromise on
their plaform, and generally aim for about 50.1 percent of the vote--they'd
rather 60 percent of gun-lovers than 100 percent, because the latter is
unpalatable to the rest of their members. _Therefore the crazy fringe of every
issue is alienated._ The GOP and Democrats are _not_ really restricted to a
given platform. This is why "GOP success" can _never_ amount to a Fascist
takeover, and why "Democrat success" can never amount to a Communist takeover.

 __ __ __ __ __ __* Suggestion:

When the admins see something as "off topic", perhaps they should enable a
down arrow for that post only, allowing everyone else to decide for
themselves.

------
gojomo
Your observation would work better on your personal blog than as a story on
"Hacker News".

~~~
portLAN
Whether or not this is the appropriate forum for this particular post, it's
high time that hackers became politically aware. Existing power structures are
set on criminalizing possession and usage of information in order to enforce
artificial scarcity to maintain profits: Germany just passed a law declaring
"hacker tools" illegal; the RIAA is now arguing that "making files available",
even without copying, is infringement; there are provisions of the DMCA that
make decrypting information you have legal access to _illegal_ (DeCSS);
Comcast is stopping BitTorrent transfers; patents threaten everyone; even your
home Internet connection is severely throttled upstream to make you more of a
consumer. The list could go on and on (Skype and new Federal eavesdropping-on-
citizens-without-warrants "laws"; possible capital gains/income tax on virtual
goods you've never sold; suing entire college student bodies at once in a
fishing expedition for mp3 trading, etc., etc.)

There is an enormous amount of money to be made in the near term by
plutocratic information restriction. Unfortunately the severe clampdowns
threaten to change the model from wealth _creation_ to wealth _stagnation_ ,
and everyone loses as money transfer moves closer to zero-sum.

 _"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's
ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a
complete standstill today. ... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A
future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price
the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies
have an interest in excluding future competitors."_ \-- Bill Gates

~~~
nostrademons
That's true, but unfortunately the type of "political awareness" that arises
out of social news sites seems to be guys sitting around on their computers
and complaining about it. That doesn't help anything; it just pisses off
ordinary people who complain that "these tech folks are so _negative_ ".

IMHO, Google's got the right idea. Become wealthy and powerful, and then
you're in a position to lobby the government to change things. Unfortunately
many people just sit back and complain about what Google's doing too...

~~~
portLAN
Nonviolent noncooperation FTW. "Evil" schemes can't be implemented without
programmers to do the work. Simply by being aware and choosing to work on
something else -- GNU, Linux, your start-up, defeating DRM, anything open
source -- you help swing the balance back in favor of everyone else.

