In defense of political party bosses

As I said, flawless from Day One. Like a ... like a ... what's that perfect gemstone? 

Ah, yes: The Tax-Free Cubic Zirconia State.

It seems to me that a parliamentary system of some sort would serve us better now.  Two parties are not enough to capture the hopes and wishes of all Americans.  Right now, the red state / blue state breakdown is so rigid that if you are Republican in a blue state or Democrat in a red state, your vote never really means anything.

tjohn said:

It seems to me that a parliamentary system of some sort would serve us better now.  Two parties are not enough to capture the hopes and wishes of all Americans.  Right now, the red state / blue state breakdown is so rigid that if you are Republican in a blue state or Democrat in a red state, your vote never really means anything.

+1

Technically we wouldn't have to become a parliamentary system to allow alternative parties into the process and diminish the red/blue divide. 

If Congress allowed multi-member districts, political and racial minorities could gain representation.  This wouldn't be as liberating to alternative parties as full-fledged proportional representation would be, but it's a small step in that direction.

If we had three-member House seats it would only take a 25% vote threshold to win representation. Something like this would allow urban Republicans to win elections and rural Democrats and make third parties occasionally viable too. 

Multi-member districts would also help racial minorities gain representation.  It would not be necessary to openly gerrymander districts to create majority-minority districts anymore since in many, many places minority voters are already more than a quarter of the electorate. 

The US Constitution doesn't say anything about single-member Congressional districts being a requirement.  In fact, in the past New Mexico and Hawaii elected representatives this way.  Single-member Congressional districts is set by 1960s statute.

tjohn said:

It seems to me that a parliamentary system of some sort would serve us better now.  Two parties are not enough to capture the hopes and wishes of all Americans.  Right now, the red state / blue state breakdown is so rigid that if you are Republican in a blue state or Democrat in a red state, your vote never really means anything.

Today we have parliamentary politics in a presidential system. Politicians vote almost exclusively along party lines, but there's no constitutional method for resolving the resulting impasses. Eg, both Pres. Obama, and the Republican majority in Congress, can claim democratic mandates, and there's absolutely no way to resolve that short of one party winning both branches. It's checks and balances via party, not via branch.

Upthread I said I had my own speculation for why people are no longer buying into the system. Here it is. I apologize for the extreme length, though I promise I really did try to cut it down!

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First, as I noted, politics isn't about issues, it's about identity. Try to approach politics as a competition between coherent ideologies, and you'll be quickly frustrated. What, exactly, does being opposed to abortion have to do with skepticism around global warming? How exactly does anti-GMO activism sit comfortably alongside proud declarations of being "pro-science?"

Political parties are a mess, in terms of philosophical consistency. Heck, people are a mess, in those terms. We don't wake up on our 18th birthday, dispassionately weigh the competing philosophical claims of political parties, then walk down to the county clerk's office and register for one. No -- our political identity is heavily influenced by our family, our friends, and our peers. We belong to a group first, and then come up with rational reasons for why we belong there second. We are "political animals," as Aristotle put, and in the sense that he understood it - as primarily social creatures.

Political parties aren't churches. They don't exist to champion a particular view of the world. They exist to win elections, which means cobbling together enough votes that you have more than the competition. Of course they're a shaggy mess - what else can you expect from a shambling coaltion of various groups in a large, diverse country?

But none of this is new -- so what's changed? Why does politics seems especially dysfunctional lately?

I don't think you can seriously discuss politics in America without talking about race. Race is not biologically "real" of course -- it's a social construct -- but it's precisely its social nature that makes it so central to politics. Politics is about organized identity, and race is about defining social groups, who belongs in which group, and which groups get to hold power. Questions of race nearly derailed the constitution. They precipitated civil war. I'd argue they also paved the way to our current highly polarized politics, as Americans identifying as black went from favoring the Democratic party to becoming almost exclusively Democratic voters - and as the Republican party increasingly became the party of white identity.

I think that in addition to that, immigration has been a big factor. The Civil Rights Act passes in 1964, and a year later you get the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Immigration is an interesting issue, because it wasn't a given that it would break along the partisan lines it has. Bush won a respectable 44% of the hispanic vote in 2004. I've seen articles use phrases like the "browning" of America, but it's not obvious that our increasingly diverse immigrant population and their descendants would get racialized as "brown" -- look at the path of Irish and Italian Americans into "whiteness" for instance.

And yet, one of Bush's biggest domestic failures was his attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which triggered a conservative revolt that still resonates. Ask Rubio if he thinks he payed a price for it. Heck, ask Rubio if he really thought someone with his last name could win the Republican nomination - or if someone with a name like "Cruz" could, or if someone married to a Mexican immigrant and who prides himself on the ability to speak Spanish could. On the one hand, I'm as amazed as anyone that Donald Trump is the nominee. On the other hand, he began his campaign with a screed against Mexican immigrants, calling them rapists and criminals. Perhaps he really was the candidate best able to capture his party's mood, after all, and isn't some weird fluke.

I'd argue that what we're seeing is essentially a crisis of white identity. If your understanding of our national identity is heavily invested in the idea that you can safely assume everyone celebrates Christmas, that the differences between men and women are obvious, that you can expect national political and cultural leaders to generally look and sound like you, then you really are losing your country. Cries to take it back ring true and, failing that, why not burn it all down? Who cares about the full faith and credit of the United States, if your money is going toward people who don't deserve it, who you're not even sure are even really American?

There probably aren't enough such people to win national elections, but if you're the party of white identity (and the GOP at this point really is), you also can't win without them. It's of course impossible to govern with that sort of political coalition, and so unsurprisingly we're not seeing a lot of governing from the national GOP.

And what of the Democrats? They're left with a pretty unwieldy set of voters. The DNC convention featured both Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg. Democratic voters include conservative Muslims and militant atheists. How sustainable is such a coalition?

I think we're in a period of cultural transition, and I have a hard time speculating how long it'll last or how it will end. Probably basically a political war of attrition until the defenders of the old cultural status quo have lost enough power to no longer be relevant, but what happens after, I'm not really sure.