I love the Bulwark’s new phrase: “manufactured nihilism” describes the way the right has sunken into the alt-right’s 4chan-inspired sense of “it’s all just a joke”, in order to hide the real threat they pose.
What if the last 20 years of consistent Democratic wins in the popular vote are actually consistent with thermostatic politics?
All other things being equal, a perfectly thermostatic two-party system would lead to a 50/50 popular vote split. And the long-term electoral results within the Sixth Party System do indicate that this is Americans’ underlying preference.
However, America doesn’t have “all other things… equal”: namely, political representation. The system of actual power in America is skewed rural, white, and minoritarian.
The crux is, it’s not hard to imagine that an appreciable swathe of the electorate (particularly swing voters) understands this asymmetry. Since it’s not all of them, and for some it’s still a bridge too far to swing their vote for, it’s an inefficient mechanism. But it gives us a scenario where the party on the wrong end of the minoritarian system would regularly outperform the other in the popular vote, while the ultimate outcome would be more or less driven by thermostasis.
All of that is to say, within this light, both sides are drawing the dumbest possible conclusions. Democrats take it as evidence of their core popularity; while the only real popularity they’ve recently had was with Obama, following an historically unpopular president. Republicans take it as evidence that without their precious minoritarianism, they’d be permanently locked out of power; but the truth is that the electorate would merely subject them to the same thermostatic pressure as now.The center-right faction of Bulwarkers and “Reform Progressives” (like Matt Yglesias) keep trying to make this big deal about “getting back to shared values”. Which is basically, taking the edge off of leftist rhetoric, and endorsing a line of cultural politics that is more or less Obama-ism, so that they can all get back to pounding the left on its economically unrealistic fantasies.
But they doth protest too much. The problem isn’t that there isn’t already a majority of Democrats who espouse their views, nor that such views are even all that uncommon among the left.
The problem is that there’s a massive right-wing propaganda machine that happily paints us all out with the same brush as the most extreme leftist Twitterati, and said Twitterati are perfectly happy for all that PR because it’s absolutely critical to their slacktivist strategy. And not for nothing, to show for all that PR, they’ve got… *checks notes*… the most converts from the center-left in modern political history.
Anyways, Democrats keep losing not because the left is out of control, but because the right has a direct and exclusive bullhorn to its base that it uses to amplify the worst elements of the left. This asymmetric exposure of each side’s extreme is one of the major drivers of asymmetric polarization.
ConProgs and ReformProgs like us, alike with mainstream Democrats, keep failing to understand that this is the problem. So we preach to a party that already mostly agrees with us — after all, Biden won the primary by 60%, folks! — and nothing happens because they already agree. We need to move past this stupid shadowboxing against a left that is and remains impotent, and figure out how to make sure that our “Sanecrat”1 message actually gets out to the critical swing voters.New Trend: Okay, it’s not exactly “new”, but it’s dangerous. By now we’re all already familiar with Democrats complaining about how the supposedly “liberal” media don’t actually do any favors to liberals.
What’s dangerous here is that we run the risk of ending up with the same mess we hate in the right-wing media: a propaganda machine meant to inflame the base, that ultimately ends up a slave to it.Fuck Australia. Okay, not actually, but I got your attention now, didn’t I?2 RCV haters love to point to Australia as an example of how RCV doesn’t necessarily lead to multiparty democracy in the long run.
However, the CIZST counterargument is that Australia only has a population of 25 million, and high homogeneity of national identity. Australia has never had a very strong history of sectionalism, which is one of the biggest confounders of CIZST/Duverger’s Law. Under CIZST, therefore, we’d expect RCV — itself a system that does degenerate to FPTP-like results — to in fact degenerate to FPTP’s Duverger result of a two-party system3.
By contrast, the US has multiple regional arenas where national brands could break down along existing intraparty faultlines. Libertarians would practically replace Republicans in the Northeast. DSA would happily become a thorn in Democrats’ sides in their urban strongholds. Greens would replace Democrats in almost all rural areas outside the Southern stronghold of Black Democrats. At any rate, the US has ~13x the population of Australia, which is plenty enough for there to be more parties under RCV. And we’re far more ethnically and ideologically diverse than our friends down under.
My magnum opus on “How To Fix It All” is still in progress, and I’m honestly waiting to really flesh out CIZST before even daring to attempt to make an ultimate prescription for how to save America from itself. But we can at least conclude today that my general theory of “RCV is the most realistic path towards multiparty reform” is not invalidated by the Australian counterexample.Does nobody recognize the political resemblance between Paul Gosar and Preston Brooks? Just saying. It’s all a bunch of hard-right honor-culture bullshit. Fuck both of them.
Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving, folks!
For those who didn’t get it, that’s “Sane Democrat”. Keep up, children!
Sorry to any Aussies or their sympathizers in the audience. If you’ve actually read this far and kept your attention up, then kudos.
For the nerds sitting in the front of the class, Australia has STV in its Senate (which is basically just multi-member RCV), and thus minor parties spend more of their energy campaigning there.