Ten Ideas to Make Politics Less Rotten

[jamil]

So what did you make of Rove's dissertation about how anything that threatens two-party rule is bad, because it will lead to Executives which have no "50% mandate to govern," and we'd be full of crackpot parties &candidates like Europe, etc., etc.


The first thing I thought of was, well, didn't the agitation of one such crackpot party allow Britain to get out of the EU?


(...and my second thought was...if we were in something like the EU...would Karl Rove _really_ favor letting us peasants & our pitchforks out of it?)


I think I answered my own question. Mr. Rove, meet Mr. Trump.

In short, I think Rove is full of ****. A more representative system produces a stronger, not weaker mandate. >60% of voters don't like either Hillary or Trump. So if one of them wins in a landslide, does that really give the winner any mandate besides not being the other?


Europe has a multi-party system, but the way they do it is even less representative than ours. CGP Grey put out an excellent video on that. Maybe the Brexit result was irresponsible. I'm not qualified to make that determination for them. The thing that produced that result was frustration with the leaders their voting system produced. I think we've commented in that thread that Brexit was their middle finger.


The problem with non-representative systems is that it produces results that people don't want. Eventually they get pissed and the natural correction or reset for non-representative governments comes into play: revolution, either by arms or ballot. These so-called "crackpot" leaders are the reset, a consequence of years of dissatisfaction by a large portion of the population.


My overall impressions of Rove is that I think he's spinning facts to make the most crony-friendly system sound best. The problem I want solved is the problem of representation. I want leaders to represent people, and not an elite few. I want leaders to be accountable to people for how they wield power. Rove is trying to solve problems like, there isn't enough partisanship in politics. Cronies don't have enough influence on elections. The wrong side (there are only two in his world, after all) is controlling people's lives instead of HIS side.


I'd rather that government not have such power at all. With that kind of government constraint, people can indeed be trusted to choose the government.

Both parties tend to move away from their extremes in order to win elections. And sometimes they tend to share a great commonality when it comes to the public agenda. They differ in big ways, no doubt about it, but imagine a system in which everybody could organize around personalities, single issues, and highly developed and very narrow ideologies.

Rove has this wrong. The two party system pigeonholes candidates into mandatory support for positions they would not support if they could be honest. This affects politicians with extreme positions as well as moderate positions since both have to lie to a large group to build a coalition large enough to win.


If a two-party system promotes issues voting, there are a couple of problems with that. It's a choice between two sets of issues, some of which may be loathsome on both sides. Also, because politicians must pretend to be a Republican or Democrat, those issues are a fraud. This very thing is the essence of what pisses us off. We vote for one of the two sides which check the most boxes, and then they get into office and become who they really are. That would happen in any voting system to some extent, but the two-party system actually requires it.


And to Rove's point, eliminating the two-party system doesn't make it about personalities over issues. That's absurd. If I have a choice between a dozen candidates, I'm going to rank them in order of issues checked off and my confidence in their authenticity. Not their personality.

The Electoral College pushes us towards a two-party system and that thereby promotes stability by providing a barrier against multi-candidate races and the kind of disasters that we see democracies in Western Europe and elsewhere, where the electorate is fragmented by a multi-party system with a wide range of parties, some of them based around personalities, some of them based around regional interests, some of them based around ideological constructs, others of them based around a single issue, some of them based around simply the idea of blowing up the existing system.

At least I agree with Rove on that. Certainly not on the "stability" part.


The US did not start as a two-party default, but it quickly evolved into that because our system mostly naturally produces two dominant parties. "First past the post" is a most natural binary system. It forces people into the pigeonhole of least evils which devolved into a default two. The EC is an enhancer of that effect because of the "winner takes all" requirement. Rove thinks that's a good thing. I think that two different grades of evil are still evil.

I think the abolition of it would make these problems that we have of confidence and a sense of personal efficacy, worse. The Electoral College prevents, for example, presidents with a deeply minority vote. It keeps us from engaging in runoffs like we’ve seen recently in Austria and Italy and France that further scramble and weaken the two parties. It provides the winner a sense of a national mandate that helps the new president govern. It forces both parties also to campaign in diverse states — big states like Florida and Ohio, medium states like Colorado and Virginia, and small states like New Hampshire and Iowa, not just sort of big cities, big concentrations.

This is absurd.


I am not unconfident in my leaders because they have or don't have a mandate. I am unconfident because the two choices don't present candidates I can be confident in. Pigeonholing into two camps doesn't increase confidence. It doesn't create mandates.


If I vote for my first choice out of a dozen candidates, and my 2nd or 3rd or maybe even 4th choice wins, I'm still confident that the winner will perform better than my last choice. That's a much better potential than we have now. Regardless of the outcome of THIS election, I have almost no confidence in any of the possible winners. I have no sense at all of personal efficacy in any of the candidates that this two party system has produced.

To comment on his ideas about the EC, the effect is that it forces both parties to focus primarily in the states which have the highest likelihood to swing in their favor. If all states were nearly equal locks for either party, and there is only two states that could swing, then those two would be the focus of the campaign to the exclusion of the rest of the people. California is a lock for Dems, but maybe 40% of Californians aren't Democrats. Because of the EC, 100% of their votes go to Dems. They may as well not bother voting. Calling that "diverse" is absurd and is pure spin.


The only reason anyone cares about Iowa and New Hampshire has nothing to do with the EC anyway. It only has to do with the fact that those states have their primaries first. Candidates want to build momentum, so wintering in Iowa and New Hampshire is what they do. That has absolutely no benefit for the other 48 states, unless the psychological manipulative effect it has for the cronies is a benefit.


Rove's whole argument seems to be an attempt to spin the inherent problems with our current voting system, and I think it is because it is the most manipulable system, in which cronies can most easily influence outcomes. Carl Rove IS a crony in the first degree, and I am not at all surprised that he would advocate to keep the system most exploitable by cronies to benefit cronies.

 

[Hohn]

^^^QFT!!!^^^

I'm sick of seeing politicians cave in on their "principles" and their promises to their constituents just to get something done. One of the reasons I liked Ron Paul was that he voted "NO" on just about everything.

The *something* that needs to be done is repeal, repeal, repeal. There's enough bad law on the books to the keep the next 20 Congresses very busy doing nothing but repealing.

 

[SSGSAD]

Two ideas:

1) Term limits, 3 for House, 2 for Senate.
2) Return the choosing of Senators to the state legislatures.

As to Olympia Snowe, i heard the podcast. There is a basic logical flaw in her thinking. She assumes that a legislature that passes more legislation is a better one and a legislature that passes little legislation is unsuccessful.

Why would we assume that legislators who have diametrically opposed philosophies should work to gether to just get something done?

I agree, but ONE MORE thing .....

NO RETIREMENT .....

Take care of yourself, after you leave office .....

NO burden on the taxpayer .....

 

[Ddillard]

Simple enough. Reverse the politicians pay with that of military dispursing. If they earned as little as our service members do, they would most assuredly flee. The only politicians remaining would be for a representing body instead of elitist agenda.