Dirty Hippies » Libertarians

The American Parliament: Our nation’s 10 political parties

Sam Smith — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 05:00:58 +0000

Part two in a series.

Forgive me for abstracting and oversimplifying a bit, but one might argue that American politics breaks along the following 10 lines:

Social Conservatives
Neocons
Business Conservatives
Traditional Conservatives (there’s probably a better term, but I’m thinking of old-line Western land and water rights types)
Blue Dog Democrats
New Democrats
Progressives
Libertarians: True
Libertarians: American (Tea Party)
Greens

There are points of overlap, obviously. In a pure parliamentary environment, these might hypothetically be ten distinct parties, or at least four or five. SocCons are defined by a fairly unitary range of religious concerns, and while they can easily make common cause with certain groups, economic issues are peripheral to their raison d’etre. Neocons and Business Conservatives (Country Club Cons) seem to overlap quite a bit and they appear to get on well with TradCons. The New Dems are functionally indistinguishable from Business Conservatives at this point in history, and the Blue Dogs might be thought of as New Dems with a healthy streak of SocCon running through them. There aren’t enough True Libertarians to shake a stick at, but the perspective is viable enough to be counted here. The American Libertarian/Tea Party is a strange brew driven by radical, race-inflected anti-tax and anti-government ideology. It has been heavily funded by BizCons, draws heavily on a bastardized understanding of the writings of Ayn Rand, and should never be confused with true Libertarianism.

Serious Progressives and Greens can be hard to tell apart – many Greens seem to be people who have given up on the utility of the Democratic party, and their official platform reads a lot like any strongly progressive mission.

If you’re familiar with the Political Compass, we might use that framework to express these positions graphically:

These ten different parties, such as they are, have to cram themselves into a two-party system, and the result usually shakes out this way:

Republicans: Social, Business, Neo and TradCons, Libs and Tea Party
Democrats: Blue Dogs, New Dems, Progressives and Greens

However, when it comes time to pass laws, order frequently break down. During the Bush years we saw a lot of Blue Dog and New Dem cooperation with the GOP, and under Obama we’re seeing the continued dominance of that “center/right” coalition, a practical result that frustrates progressives, especially in light of all kinds of polling showing that once you set aside labels and ask people to focus on what sorts of outcomes they believe in, the American public is far more supportive of progressive policies than is commonly understood.

The American Parliament

If we moved to a proportional parliamentary system (no, we’re not going to, not in a million years, but hypothetically) and shifted the coalition building process to the governing phase instead of the campaign/electoral phase, we might initially see the 10 hypothetical parties coalescing into a shape that looks something like this:

Social Conservatives – significant enough numbers to go it as a distinct entity that can demand concessions on its core issues from all constituencies except the Progressives.
NeoLiberal – the grand coalition of wealth-minded conservatives, New Dems and Blue Dogs, plus the Tea Party.
Progressives – Progs plus Greens now have enough stroke to exert viable leverage on the legislative process.
Libertarians – May choose to ignore social libertarianism completely and join Neos, but could decide to go it alone or to forge something with TradCons.

Over time, we might expect a shift to take place. We know some things about the American public. For instance:

The backbone of the social reactionary segment of the population (specifically, SocCons and Tea Party) is aging and…
the huge Millennial generation rejects race-based and anti-gay politics completely.
The Mills are more concerned with social justice than any generation alive.
Immigration and demographic patterns are shifting dramatically, and within a few decades whites will no longer comprise a majority of the nation’s population. The largest gains are being made by Latinos.
The current trend toward concentration of wealth in a few hands will eventually reach an inflection point. Either policies will be enacted to disperse the wealth or, if history teaches us anything, broad economic distress will lead to a social explosion. Put simply, the trend of the last two generations toward concentration of wealth isn’t sustainable.

If these trends hold, we might expect, over the course of the next couple of decades, a distinct slide to the left. This adjustment would remove the NeoLiberal coalition’s right flank and could very well see the emergence of a new American coalition that looks and behaves a great deal like European Social Democracy. Since America is also overwhelmingly Christian, the leftward shift of religious institutions driven by the die-off of older SocCons and the Millennials’ concern for social justice might also spur the rise of an American analogue to Christian Democracy – an eventuality that would almost certainly be fueled by the increased impact of Latino voters, who are (for the time being, anyway) more progressive economically but driven by Catholic social mores.

Back to Reality

So many ifs, so many variables, and all of it predicated on an assumption of magic-wand proportional representation. As I said off the top, a thought experiment. Still, even if you set the governmental structure aside, the social, economic and political dynamics on which the preceding section is premised are very real. The rest of the world has seen similar coalitions and constituencies arise in both proportional and pluralist systems, and there’s no reason to believe that it couldn’t happen here.

The kicker, of course, is a lesson that European history teaches in painful detail: to wit, the road to a more productive democracy sometimes has to navigate hellish terrain, and there are those in the US who believe that it’s going to get really, really dark before dawn.

Perhaps. At a minimum, though, it never hurts to note where we are, to dream about where we want to go, and to plan meticulously for the journey.

Conservatives, Progressives and the future of representative democracy: what would an American Parliament look like?

Sam Smith — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:30:00 +0000

Part one in a series.

A little thought experiment for a Tuesday morning…

Over the past few years I have tried to make as much sense as I could out of the American political landscape. By nature, I’m a theoretically minded thinker, and the point of these exercises has been to try and articulate the structures, shapes, motivators and dynamics the define who we are so that I might develop better theories about why so that I might then think more effectively about how we might be nudged in a more productive direction. Facts → Theory → Action, in other words.

I have observed a few things along the way.

The Democrats are really two parties (at least) masquerading as one.
On the whole, those who dominate the Democratic Party don’t really object to Republican policies.
When you perform lexical analyses, Republican and Democratic pols are far more alike than they are different.
Both parties suck. However, they do not suck equally. Instead of good vs. bad, think of it as worse vs. worst.
As Noam Chomsky told a sold-out Mackey Auditorium crowd in Boulder Friday night, “Richard Nixon was our last liberal president.” No doubt – American politics has slid so far to the right in my lifetime that were he alive today, Nixon would be too liberal to even get nominated. By the Democrats.

I have also been wondering, perhaps as a result of Wufnik‘s analyses of last year’s elections in Britain, whether the US might be better off with a different electoral system. Perhaps a UK-style parliamentary process would be an improvement, or maybe we could do a better job representing the full spectrum of American political perspectives via one of the other approaches being used by various democracies around the world. I don’t know as much about these other forms of government as I’d like, but what I do know suggests that there certainly better ways of affording minority constituencies representation that’s more in proportion to their numbers than is strictly the case in the two-party system. All systems require the construction of coalitions, but where they are constructed and how makes a great deal of difference. More on this in a second.

It’s also true that the American two-party system is subject to distortions that can allow a particularly noisy and militant minority with significant financial backing to exert influence all out of proportion to its actual numbers while other groups, perhaps even larger ones, find their own perspectives under-represented in the legislature. That a constituency should have representation reflecting its actual size instead of an emotional quotient that’s so easily and cynically manipulated strikes me as inherently democratic.

Proportionality vs. Plurality

I rarely recommend Wikipedia for nuanced research, but its overview on proportional representation is a helpful 101-level resource with plenty of links to more detailed information. As this page explains, the US and UK employ plurality systems, “where disproportional seat distribution results from the division of voters into multiple electoral districts, especially ‘winner takes all’ plurality (‘first-past-the-post’ or FPTP) districts.” In other words, in a given situation, the winner of an election can represent a minority constituency while the various competing perspectives, which together comprise a majority, go completely unrepresented. Most Americans can probably think of multiple examples of this phenomenon, at local, state and national levels.

Let’s consider an alternative approach.

Say you lived in a nation with a parliamentary system driven by party-list proportionality (such as you find in Austria, Finland, Israel, Poland, Scotland and Spain, for instance). Instead of five to ten distinct constituencies trying to sandwich themselves into two parties, each of these entities is established as its own party. Perhaps you’re a member of the smallish Party X, which polls show historically represents the views of nearly 10% of the country’s population.

In the US, a hypothetical third party or voter bloc that delivers 8% at the polls gets zero representatives and when Congress is sworn in they have no leverage. Their only hope for representation is to throw their support behind either the Dems or the GOP and hope that once those candidates are elected they will listen to the concerns of X Party leaders. Operative word: “hope.” In the US coalitions are loosely constructed at the campaign stage. You have 8%? Great, vote for us and here’s what we’ll do once we’re elected. Except that such promises aren’t binding and there’s no practical means of holding the Dems or Republicans, as the case may be, accountable to their promises. If you don’t like it, fine – go vote for the other guys, who, by the way, are as diametrically opposed to your platform as it is possible to be.

Take it or leave, just shut up and go away.

However, in the alternative proportional system, 8% represents actual stroke. If Party X scores 8% of the vote, this system assures them of 8% of the seats in the legislature. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a lot more than 0%. And it can translate into real power. If no party garners a straight majority, this 8% might be critical to forming a ruling government. In this case, Party X’s smallish minority can then demand clear concessions (such as policy positions, cabinet appointments, etc.) to its platform in return for its support.

Over time, the US system translates 8% into zero, whereas the calculus in a proportional system is more likely to conclude that 8% = 8%. How democratic, right?

Now, I acknowledge that in certain instances we might not like the idea that a particular minority can exert this kind of authority over governance. However, the process I am describing generates a greater transparency than we have in the US at present. Hey, look – that’s the 8% – they’re right there, we can see them, they’re accountable for their votes (as are their coalition partners), and this information is exceptionally actionable when the next election rolls around. I’m not describing a perfect system, I know, but I do wonder if it might not be far more aligned with what Americans, from our founders right down to average citizens in 2011, think democracy ought to be.

Maybe, maybe not, but there’s nothing about our current system that suggests reforms aren’t needed, is there?

Tomorrow: America’s 10 Political Parties