
Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship - mpweiher
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html
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OliverJones
Harvard Biz School prof Michael Porter and coauthor Katherine Gehl have
observed that the two-party political system is a classic pepsi/coke duopoly,
and it functions as designed. It's designed to perpetuate the revenue / power
/ relationships of members of the political-industrial complex. These are
elected officials, but they're also staff, fundraisers, pollsters, ad
agencies, newspapers, TV companies, even Facebook and Google; anybody who
depends on politics (different from government) for their living.

I suspect the UK's Tory/Labour system is just as much a duopoly as the USA's
Republican/Democratic system. Look at the House of Commons. The two parties
sit across from one another shouting the equivalent of "Pepsi!" "Coke!"

We tech entrepreneur types know something about how hard it is to disrupt
duopolies: they focus their efforts on resisting disruption. And the political
duopoly is great at resisting disruption.

When the public perceives elections as drag races we pay attention to rubbish
like "momentum" rather than good government appropriately sized. And that sets
the duopoly free to serve themselves and not the population.

In the USA 2016 federal election, HRC was perceived as a duopolist and DJT as
an outsider.

Attempts to limit campaign spending have the purpose of disrupting the
duopoly. But that's a head-on disruption, like me developing a jet engine and
trying to sell against GE and Pratt&Whitney. Doesn't work.

Maine has introduced rank-choice voting to allow candidates to make strong
pitches about policies without becoming "spoilers." That can only help disrupt
the duopoly. In fact it did in 2018. Some "minor" candidates had their voices
heard.

California's primary elections are no longer in the duopoly system: all
candidates are on one ballot, and the top two contend with each other in the
general election. California could simply introduce a ranked-choice general
election, which would have the same effect.

Here's the paper by Gehl and Porter. Worth your time.
[https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/why-
competitio...](https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/why-competition-
in-the-politics-industry-is-failing-america.pdf)

~~~
gpvos
The Featured Article seems to address something more general than that. In the
Netherlands, we have a nearly perfectly proportional system and somewhere
around 13 parties in parliament at the moment, but the beige dictatorship and
the general failure mode of representational democracy is similar, with the
moderate parties (the old left and right parties) becoming more similar every
election cycle, and voters fleeing to the extreme left and right. I mean,
disrupting the duopoly is very necessary, but after that you're not there yet.

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TrevorAustin
There are a number of structural things you can do to push back on the long-
run capture of parties and therefore the political process. None of them play
super well with party-list proportional representation, but here's what people
should be thinking about, especially in places with party primaries:

\- Require party primaries to be as open and competitive as general elections.
This is the traditional American approach, and for all of its own the failure
modes that we've seen since 2013, you can't say that the problem has been
beigeness enforced by party elites. Ask Eric Cantor, Jeb Bush, and Joe Crowley
about that.

\- Replace party primaries for single-member districts altogether, with open
primaries with STV or approval voting. That gives even more room for policy
entrepreneurs whose appeal may cut across existing party power bases.

\- Make heavier use of Sortition and/or policy juries, delegating decisions to
randomly-selected deliberative bodies. That gives you lots of democratic
legitimacy in a way that's very hard to capture. Tellingly, this approach is
already used for the State's most dangerous powers around criminal punishment.

~~~
zeveb
> Require party primaries to be as open and competitive as general elections.
> This is the traditional American approach, and for all of its own the
> failure modes that we've seen since 2013, you can't say that the problem has
> been beigeness enforced by party elites.

I think that an excellent argument can be made that the failure modes of
American politics have been the result of too-open primaries rather than
party-run caucuses. With caucuses, the party elite are able to groom
mainstream candidates acceptable to the electorate; primaries (esp. plurality
primaries) are susceptible to pluralist capture.

> Make heavier use of Sortition and/or policy juries, delegating decisions to
> randomly-selected deliberative bodies.

Now that's a _great_ idea! I think it'd be awesome to have a third, random
house in each legislature. Actually ensuring random selection, in a manner
acceptable by the populace at large, would be a trick, though.

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golemotron
I'd like to like the article, but it nostalgically posits a golden age of
amateur politicians.

Even Lincoln was a lawyer.

Before the Roman Empire, there were still people who spent most of their
waking moments striving for power.

Rose-colored glasses don't serve us well.

------
13415
tl;dr

the author of this "random meta-political noodling" (his words) has re-
invented some of the old arguments for direct democracy that have been
perpetuated from all fringe parties in all countries since democracy exists.

Remember the German Green Party's "rotation principle". It was based on the
same arguments, to prevent "professional politicians" and keep politics close
to the basis. They gave it up soon once they realized that it's not working.
It turned out that politicians need some political competence that is acquired
through parliamentary work, and they need to have media presence to be re-
elected.

Everything in this blog posts could have been written in the 70s when these
arguments and radical "basic democratic" desires had already been discussed ad
nauseum by the less radical revolutionaries.

Personally, I believe that when a representational democracy is turned into a
basic democracy with amateur politicians, then it will succumb to populism and
become a dictatorship in no time.

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stult
I think Stross is on the right track but doesn't get the whole story. It's all
about regulating the rate of change in society. Institutions naturally tend
toward preserving the status quo, for all the reasons Stross specifies. But
institutions that prohibit change altogether do not survive. The tendency
toward "beigeness" comes about as political actors converge on a level of
change-permissiveness (and thus functional rate of change) that optimally
compromises between conservatives and liberals (in the sense of those against
and for change respectively). Too much change is scary because it seems
unstable. Too little is scary because it seems oppressive. So political actors
seem beige because they are selected for moderation between those extremes.
The changes they permit are thus inoffensive to a plurality of citizens and
the changes they prohibit are equally inoffensive. And therefore equally
distinteresting.

~~~
dfilppi
Change builds up like a sneeze. The vested interests resist until the dam
bursts. That can take centuries. I recommend thinking about other things than
politics for personal happiness.

------
martythemaniak
I like Stross' essays, but I think this one is slightly off the mark. Sure,
everything he says makes sense, more or less, but we also have to ask whether
this convergence happens for a reason other than the simple one he outlines.

After all, we can see examples of convergent evolution is a huge variety of
fields - biological evolution, product design, scientific theories etc. If
independent groups/individuals set out to achieve some aim, oftentimes their
answers will turn out very similar to each other. And there's nothing that
says "The People" have to find some particular solution intuitively appealing.
In this case, he says alternatives aren't presented as choices, but is that
because of the mechanism he outlines, or because those choices aren't really
choices and were whittled out for very good reasons?

I actually think anti-vaccine thought can be very helpful in explaining way
more than the anti-vax movemement. At its core it represents a set of people
raised in a safe, secure environment without the living memory or first-hand
experience of a problem. Only logical, rational, book-memory remains, as well
as the "rituals". But this sort of memory is weak, unintuitive and requires a
certain mindset and education. So opponents start to question whether this
thing is even real, they employ stronger, emotional arguments, they appear as
"outsiders" demanding "choices" etc.

So how much of this is the Iron Law of Oligarchy and how much is the Anti-vax
mindset spreading to the political realm?

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gpvos
(2013)

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pjc50
(2013)

It seems people have found a route out of beige, the Trump/Brexit outsider
victory. This is ... not an improvement.

~~~
someguydave
On the contrary, President Trump has managed to convince Democrats to unemploy
a significant number of beige bureaucrats through the guise of a shutdown.

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fallingfrog
The situation has gotten so bad, and the political machine is totally
oblivious, because they are only listening to the people who fund their
campaigns; in other words, moneyed elites. The rest of us are deeply in debt,
isolated, taking medication to cope. The vast majority of the country supports
healthcare for all but it’s still considered politically impossible. I worry
that we’re living in France circa 1785. When the dam bursts it’s going to be
ugly.

~~~
linuxlizard
I know a lot of local politicians. I've met a few state level politicians. I
know people who work professionally in politics as part of the machine. I'm
consistently told one thing politicians are most afraid of is phone calls.
When people care enough to take time out of their day and cold-call a
stranger, then a politician knows it's a big deal. Emails, form submits, fax--
who cares. But a real constituent calling a staffer is a big deal. Enough
call, then the politician gets cover from their funders to act in the peoples'
interests.

~~~
ben_w
I suspect this varies by nation. I met my then-local MP in Portcullis House,
which required not just a phonecall but a pre-arranged appointment that she
was forced to cancel at the last minute because of urgent business in the
House of Commons. I had to rebook for the following day.

I said my piece, but she not only didn’t change her vote (I wasn’t expecting
her to, it was her first term and I’m a political noob), but she didn’t even
raise a single one of the issues I had when the relevant law was debated.

On the plus side, she did give me the contact email address of someone in
charge of a committee about that law. On the down side, he never replied.

