Kill the mind-killer
The budget stalemate in the US Congress was caused entirely by blocks of voters and representatives that coalesced around strong sets of opinions that few people would have come up with on their own, and by political party leaders forcing representatives in their parties to toe the party line. Politics isn’t the mind killer. Political parties are the mind-killer.
Parties are also notorious for obliterating information in elections, as well as for encouraging voters to vote sans information. If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you’d heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise. Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.
For discussion:
What other disadvantages are provided by the existence of political parties?
Do political parties provide us with any advantages at all?
If so, do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?
How might we go about disenfranchising political parties?
We want the freedom to form groups that promote political concerns. But it would be possible to keep these groups at a greater distance from elected representatives. Candidates for office could be forbidden from endorsing a particular party. The Congress could be forbidden from basing any procedural rules on party affiliation. Political parties could be forbidden from making large donations to election campaigns, or sponsoring advertising. That’s not so different from what we do today with religious groups, which are not much different from political parties.
Political parties are currently officially part of Congress’ operation, even though they’re not in the constitution. There are all sorts of Congressional rules specifying how the parties interact, who gets to choose committee members, who runs the House and Senate floors, etc. A party leader can punish a representative who doesn’t toe the line with many incentives and disincentives.
Make that illegal. Make persecuting a representative for party-based reasons have the same legal standing as persecuting a representative for religious reasons.
I will ignore comments saying “you’re an intellectual dreamer”, for the usual reasons.
People who participate in a political system will usually find it to their advantage to form alliances. Since the incentive is there, if the formal trappings of political parties are prohibited, this will only result in such alliances existing in informal ways (much like suppressing the market economy results in an underground economy immediately springing up). This is true for all political systems except pure autocracies and perhaps small oligarchies that are tightly-knit enough to operate with general consensus.
The U.S. founders generally had a negative view of political parties and were hoping to design a republican system that wouldn’t have them. (Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10 is representative of this attitude.) Yet they completely failed, with the first party system appearing almost immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. Considering that the Founders were less delusional and ignorant about government than almost anyone who is studying politics today, and that they had something much closer to the blank slate to work with, their failure should be a convincing demonstration of the impracticability of the idea.
Besides all that, the real problem, of course, is that electoral politics is overall much less relevant than people imagine. Laws are today normally created by unelected professional bureaucracies and (to a lesser degree) judicial precedents, with legislatures providing only vague suggestions. The notions of “rulemaking” and “Chevron deference” are probably not discussed in the civics textbooks, but they are far more relevant for how government actually works than all the political theater on the TV.
This is a common attitude, but I believe it’s completely wrong. It’s the same sort of thinking that leads to people saying that you can’t question Aristotle, or the Bible.
We know a lot more than the founders did, and we can do better.
On the contrary—I see a much more accurate parallel to religious dogma in the unquestioned faith that the modern respectable academic opinion just has to be more accurate and informed than people from the past on all subjects. I agree that this is normally so when it comes to hard sciences and non-ideological subjects in general. However, when it comes to ideologically charged issues, there is no good reason to believe that the modern respectable opinion can’t be spectacularly delusional by all historical standards.
My above assertion about the Founders is not based on some special reverence for them—in fact, they don’t even rank very high on my own list of historical greats of political thought. It’s based on my opinion that the contemporary state of political thought really is delusional to a level barely precedented in human history, so that being much more sane in comparison is not a particularly high bar to clear. (I could discuss the reasons why I think so, but I’m afraid that would probably be too much of an off-topic diversion.)
Why are we assuming the “budget stalemate in the US Congress” is a problem that needs solving? What kind of evidence do you have access to that allows you to conclude that something as complicated as this is “caused entirely by” anything?
Also, the fact you didn’t check the literature on political parties before coming up with your own “solution” to the “problem” is weak confirming evidence that politics is still the mind-killer. I don’t think politics should be banned on Less Wrong, but if we are going to discuss it it would be wise to start at a fundamental level rather than with a contemporary policy debate.
For me, it’s because I have a basic grasp of politics and the economy.
I don’t appreciate baseless accusations. What do you even mean when you say I didn’t check the literature? What evidence do you have of whatever it is you’re thinking of?
This is not a contemporary policy debate. It is a question that opens with a contemporary example.
The founders, for obvious and excellent reasons, tried to structure the system so that violently controversial stuff could not get done, so that to govern effectively you needed a widespread consensus.
There is no consensus on spending unprecedented gobs of money, and it is not obvious that there should be such a consensus. Hence, gridlock. It is not a bug, it is a feature.
If the only effect of gridlock were to limit spending, that could be a feature. But the effect of gridlock in this case would be to stop government spending suddenly, and put a few million people out of a job suddenly, as well as immediately downgrading American bonds and the dollar, and other consequences as well. Calling this a feature is like building a train that jumps off the tracks if it goes over 100MPH and calling it a safety feature.
I actually have formal training in political science, so I think you’ll understand why I don’t (non-negligibly) update my beliefs in the direction of the policy advocated in your post simply because you claim to understand the basics.
Baseless? Hardly. You addressed exactly zero of the standard arguments for the beneficial effect of political parties in your post (let alone refuted them). Entire volumes have been dedicated to exploring at least 3 of the 4 questions you raised.
Oddly enough, you actually claim that political parties obliterate information, whereas the majority of political scientists believe that they provide voters with additional information that would be too costly to accumulate on their own. Since you didn’t even mention as much, seems to indicate that you are unfamiliar with the relevant literature.
Opening with a contemporary example is exactly what I meant we shouldn’t do. Discussing politics rationally is hard enough as it is without bringing in examples that people have already “chosen sides” on. It would be much wiser to draw your example from Ancient Athens or the Republic of Venice or anything that people aren’t emotionally invested in.
Also, aren’t we supposed to hold off on proposing solutions?
That was needlessly provocative. I’d ask you to provide your argument, but that would just lead to a mind-killing conversation.
A lot of these problems are problems with political parties operating in the context of the American system of government. Genuinely multi-party parliaments don’t have the same problems.
People have freedom of association and freedom of speech. I don’t see how you can “get rid of” political parties and preserve these basic freedoms.
Also, congress’s procedures aren’t determined by the constitution, they are determined by congress.
Instead of suggesting you are a dreamer, I’d rather ask what your plan is. When you say “Make that illegal”, who are you talking to? Is this a letter you meant to send to your congressman? I don’t think this is an appropriate platform for your advocacy.
As I said in my post, people have freedom of religion, but we manage to discourage religious organizations from directly contributing to political parties.
I haven’t got one. That’s why this is in the Discussion section.
Religious people can make the same contributions as anyone else can. Similarly, people with party affiliations, can make statements and contributions the same as anyone else.
You seem to assume stalemate in congress is obviously a bad thing. Given that most of what congress does tends to be passing laws that help rent-seekers, I think stalemate in congress is frequently a good thing.
You could also argue that elections are the mind-killer—if the popularity of opinions among the population had little or no impact on who got in power, people wouldn’t get worked up as much about them. I wonder if the republic of Venice—with it’s mix of elections and random choice—had more or less factionalism than modern western societies do (I would guess it wasn’t as widespread as ours, a bit like most Chinese people don’t have strong political ideologies, but the educated are more likely to).
For similar reasons, you could argue that karma on lesswrong (and reddit) is a small mind-killer.
That’s because knowing party affiliation actually gives you some information about the candidate (the more parties in the election, the more information you get).
If you want to know what kind of policies candidate Joe is likely to enact, you’ll probably get a better guess by looking at which policies were enacted by candidates of the same party as candidate Joe, than by listening to his speeches (which are likely to be mostly filled with platitudes and applause lights).
What about trying something other than modern one person one vote representative democracy?
In Australia we have a preferential ordering system (if your most preferred party does terribly on first preferences, they are eliminated and your vote goes to your second-most preferred and so on) and a truly inspired suggestion from a friend was to create a Poe’s Law Party.
This party would campaign on obviously wrong economic policy platforms, have extremely inconsistent social policies that they regularly backflip on, and bombard the populace with content-less advertisments. They would flub every debate and speech, resort to incoherent or irrelevant talking points on every single interview question, and so on. They would just be terrible. And the idea was, when the ballots are counted, any ballot that doesn’t have the Poe’s Law Party last doesn’t get counted.
Ideally we would have a computer doing a Bayesian calculation taking “placement of PLP first”, “placement of PLP second” (and so on) as evidence of bad voting skills, and have their vote’s value diminished by an appropriate amount. But likely saying “your vote will be devalued by an arcane computation that determines exactly how stupid you are with respect to voting” will enrage many people.
Upvoted for amusement.
Yes, that’s also worth considering—but is not the topic of this post. I suggest writing a different post on that.
This speaks to what is meant when people say “I don’t think politics should be banned on Less Wrong, but if we are going to discuss it it would be wise to start at a fundamental level rather than with a contemporary policy debate.”
I think a conversation at a more granular level of “assuming one person gets one vote in a representative democracy, how do we restrict political factionalism” is too narrow and not fundamental enough for LW.
Calling the US voting system “modern” is a bit of a stretch—it’s been around for a few centuries now. Given that quite a few other countries use voting systems that help alleviate the US “two party” problem, it’s not like there aren’t more up-to-date already-tested alternatives out there, too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system#Causes is a decent starter; I’ve spent a few years avoiding politics so I’d just be parroting others if I recommended anything specific :))
The current US voting system is modern by definition. ;)
I’m not sure if you intended this or not, but your discussion questions are pretty leading (the pre-determined conclusion seems like it’s supposed to be that political parties are bad).
I don’t think being leading is inherently bad, I just wanted to make sure you realized this fact.
Actually, I’m pretty sure it is politics that’s the mind-killer. Most of the breakdown of reasoned discussion due to politics that I’ve seen was not due to party-loyalty in any explicit sense, but to a much broader ideology/in-group loyalty.
On the broader topic, taking your first two points in reverese order: political parties are important because one of the vital elements in a democracy is accountability. By grouping together people and approaches as a ‘party’ we allow the voters to judge their overall effectiveness and approach—and kick them out at elections. This is particularly important for the average not-that-committed voter, but even the most politically focused person can’t actually track and judge every individual standing for office. In a similar vein, parties make it harder for someone to campaign for more spending at the same time as less taxes and so on: they produce overall positions that can be tested in greater depth for consistency. The same point applies to governments: and if you had no political parties it’s difficult to see how a governing group could have enough solidity to be judged (this is less of an issue in the USA, where you have an elected executive, than in the UK where the PM is the leader of the party/coalition that controls the House of Commons).
This point about accountability is key, IMO, because I think that the ‘being able to replace rulers without war’ and the ‘rulers fear annoying too many people’ are probably more important elements of democracy than the idea that the voters are in the best position to guide a government towards good policy in any detail. So the idea that a system would encourage only the most informed to vote (if that’s what you imply) is both unrealistic and unattractive. Unrealistic because the uninformed would be campaigned at by the media/candidates and believe they were informed and unattractive because if you managed to convince most people that they were outside the political proccess, the stability of democracy would be deeply damaged.
I think you have an overly idealistic idea of the state that would exist without parties: I suspect people would vote based on local adverts/leaflets which provided a lower level of information than they currently get by at least seeing what parties do in power. So I don’t buy that as a disadvantage. There are disadvantages around the incentive structure for politicians being wrong (party focused rather than people focused) but I’m unconvinced there’s a system that would avoid this without major other problems.
From a UK point of view, the things we tend to assume would improve US politics would be a less biased and more challenging media, and a cap on spending by political parties. i.e. what we do… But ultiamtely, I suspect that institutions have to develop with culture, and if you don’t think the US political culture is working I don’t think reform of the political architecture will be the main thing. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering/doing… but I’m suspicious of magic bullets.
Speaking from the US, that’s more or less what I think about UK politics.
Interesting! You mean in general, or that the UK is particularly weak on that front. I think most politically interested people in the UK think that the UK media should/could be better in various ways, but regard it as superior to US media in terms of bias/challenge.
Depends on who you ask. Personally I think England may be somewhat better than continental Europe.
Yes, well I suspect everyone believes their media is the least biased because their media tells them so.
Very possibly! I think it’s a little deeper than that, though: I think other people’s sort of bias seems worse than yours, plus people enjoy identifying the examples of things that seem weird from elsewhere. So people will share Fox News clips a lot here, for instance. Don’t know what the UK equivalent is when seen from outside: though there are groups within the UK who see the BBC as very biased. And we have the murdoch thing of course
I’m rather inclined to agree with them, but then again I general only here about something on the BBC when someone calls attention to their egregiously biased coverage of something.
Yep: I imagine most people generally hear the interesting and therefore usually bad news about foreign media—and to a degree politics.
To be honest, I think the BBC is biased, just in an accidental, cultural way, not a conspiracy or corruption as such. People in that sort of outfit in this country tend to be a certain sort of person, thinking in certain sort of ways.
You also have the problem of what counts as bias. Should an unbiased broadcaster sit in the middle of public opinion, avoid anything that can be taken as showing a side at all (impossible), treat all sides of every argument as equal or go with some sort of expert consensus? The BBC seems to flit between them, sometimes trying to show balance by giving an equal platform to scientific consensus and nutjobbery, and sometimes having quite a clear ‘these are the facts and the informed people know it whether the general public does or not’ approach.
In the current political system in the US, everything is based on voting for a representative. It’s useless to vote for someone with no chance of winning, so you always end up with two parties that give their candidates.
If you allow people to vote for parties, and give congress representatives in proportion to the number of votes, you still end up with parties, but you can have many more of them, so they don’t have to be as powerful. I know there are countries that do this, but I don’t know which ones. Can someone from such a country tell about this?
One possibility that occurred to me a while back is to just make congress a random sample of the population. Nobody outside of congress will vote, so they won’t form any sort of political party until their chosen. There will still be some party effects. For example, if congress has to appoint someone, and they vote on it, it will go back to the first case.
Parties will still be caused by normal human biases. If you get a hundred people together, they will form groups. It can at least be improved from the US system, which forces the adoption of parties.
A random-sample Congress might work, but there’s two major problems: -The expert problem: Running a government is not easy. There’s a whole slew of problems (including the organization and nuances of the bureaucracy, for instance) that require extensive knowledge to make informed decisions about. “Professional” politicians alleviate this somewhat, since they can (ideally) devote all their time to learning about these issues, over the course of several terms if necessary. (That’s at least one good reason why freshmen members of Congress usually aren’t committee chairs.) Without the benefit of experience, the de jure decision makers would have to rely (even more than they do now) on lobbyists, meaning government would be even more in the hands of those with the most money. Longer terms or more stringent selection would help with this, but then that runs into the second problem. -The civil rights problem: Random selection may work for composing juries, but running a government is a full-time job that would take several years to become acquainted with (see above). Not only are people going to be rather unhappy to be pulled from their lives to do something they may not be suited for, but from a purely economic standpoint, you’re removing productive members of society from their places. (Imagine if, say, Steve Jobs was chosen—suddenly a major corporation has lost the leader it has been taking a significant amount of its direction from.) Exemptions based on various circumstances might help, but that would at the same time result in a lower quality of legislator.
To be fair, this is part of how the original Athenian democracy worked, which functioned well enough. Perhaps in an entirely new government, where society would then grow based around the expectation of being randomly selected as a legislator, it might work, but I can’t see this functioning in the U.S. system without major concurrent overhauls.
The biggest issue I see is the “lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists” issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
There are potential issues with the education requirements I outlined in my post (the question of “who controls the education requirements” leaves open possible corruption, a la literacy tests). But I think it’s worth considering.
I agree that this would work better for a new government than retrofitting an existing one.
One of the main advantages of the random congress is that it doesn’t favor people who want to be lawmakers. See HHGTTG.
This, however, leads to the tragedy of the commons problem that it’s in each faction’s interest to increase the number of it’s members who WANT to be lawmakers to increase the chance that one of them is selected.
Huh. This is an interesting idea. I think I’d be okay with this if it were coupled with some kind of mandatory high school course(s) that ensure some minimal understanding of how the legislature worked. (Congress could be sampled from people who have a high school diploma).
Edit: Maybe a better idea—government provides a free/and/or/discounted college level degree, available to anyone. (or “degree-segment”, which can be applied toward general ed for regular Bachelor’s Degrees). The courses include economics, logic, public speaking, at least some sciences, etc.
People who do well (“well” being relative, of course, let’s say at least B+ish) are entered into the Congressional Draft. I think this would do a decent (at least as good as current system) of ensuring that Congress consists of people who have SOME idea of what they’re doing, don’t need to spend money or time on campaigning, and actually want to be there.
Do people think this would increase or decrease the quality of the U.S. Congress?
(If it’s a concern for you, for the time being assume the funding for the free college courses comes by removing funding from another program you don’t like)
Edit Again: Nvm, it was pointed out to me that with no long term accountability, new congresspeople would almost instantly be owned by wealthy interests, at least as badly as they are now.
Upvote for “Decrease”
Upvote for “Increase”
I think anything that starts to go down the ‘intelligent/educated have more power’ route is missing the most important elements of democracy. Not only are you cutting out large parts of the population, but these would inevitably have locality/race/income correlations that made the whole thing even uglier. Probably even gender correlations.
Not to mention the problem that people have to choose to take it, and I’m not convinced that wanting to have that power is a good sign that you should. You might have a disproportionate number of ideologues/slight megalomaniacs. Not to mention the ‘tragedy of the commons’ issue mentioned elsewhere.
Downvote for Karma Balance
Did you even read the post?
For the random members of the population thing, they can just hire advisers. There’s no reason they have to come up with the laws. It’s sort of like how in the US, there are several bills that the President comes up with, even though the constitution gives him no power to do so.
The Constitution expressly give him this power.
Article II Section. 3.
[The president] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper
We (Czech Republic) have usually four to six parties, the two strongest getting between 20% and 40% of votes. As it seems, the weaker parties are chosen mainly by voters dissatisfied by the strong parties and the political system in general. Consequently the rhetoric of the small parties focuses on “change” and “morality”; after they prove to be incapable of making any substantial change and no more moral than the average, they fall out of favour. Each term the voters select a new party which claims to finally bring the change. The practice in the parliament is probably no different from what you know, perhaps with some added extortion and power balancing within the coalition government. What beneficial effects did you expect?
You still have four to six proponents of what the change should be. In the US, you have two. Half the population thinks we should close the borders, give tax cuts to the rich, illegalize abortion, ignore unions, etc., and the other half thinks we should open the borders, give tax cuts to the poor, legalize abortion, listen to unions, etc. This doesn’t produce very many people who want to close the borders, give tax cuts to the poor, illegalize abortion, and listen to trade unions, for example.
Also, if the weaker parties keep getting replaced, the replacements are likely different, so people have to have their own opinion to figure out which new one to go with.
You have primaries, we don’t. When the parties are weak and small, they cannot afford primaries open to public, since their opponents would choose candidates who oppose the party’s policies. Therefore the primaries are open only to party members and you can’t be a member of more than one party (the parties exclude the possibility in their statutes). Even if you are a party member, the primaries are extremely indirect and opaque: e.g. in the Social Democratic Party (one of the big two) the process is basically as such:
The members of each Local Organisation (the basic unit, usually less than few dozen people) choose among themselves a member of a District Executive Committee.
The District Executive Committee elects members of a Regional Executive Committee.
The Regional Executive Committee composes a candidate list for the administrative region they represent. The candidates should be chosen from the set nominated by the Local Organisations, but the Regional Committee and also the Central Executive Committee has the right to add their own (that happens sometimes, although not as a rule).
The Local Organisation elects few delegates from among themselves to take part in the District Conference.
The delegates of the District Conference elect delegates of a Regional Conference.
The Regional Conference votes about the candidate list and may reject it, if it happens, then they may vote for single candidates on the list and change their ordering. In principle, more candidates may be rejected altogether and then the Regional Executive Committee has to compose a new list. (Normally the delegates accept any list they are given, for they don’t want to spend hours by the subsequent procedures.)
The candidates don’t make clear to party members what policy they want to pursue, since there is no point in it.
Also, the weaker parties rarely insist on realisation of their own programmes. Once they make it into the coalition government (and whether they do depends mostly on personal relations between the politicians rather than the similarities of party programmes), they start to engage in power games whose main goal is to implant certain people into the state bureaucracy. The weak parties rarely even have a clear distinct programme. Their campaigns usually stress such banalities as “fighting corruption”, “new style”, “responsibility”.
On the ‘random members of the population’ thing, I think this could make a very interesting ‘second house’ (so as far as I understand it, Senate for US and House of Lords for UK). So the detail of bills would still be crafted by a house that knew what it was doing, but then a sort of super-jury would check the bills and challenge things they didn’t like. One of the main benefits would be that it would reduce the feeling of ‘these crazy decisions, only politicians would make them, no common sense’ and ensure that there was a clear sense of what a random bunch of people would do.
With a bit less power/responsibility this isn’t quite as vulnerable to the various problems identified: but it could still be very easy to directly or indirectly bribe these people, and you’d still get the ’12 men too unimaginative or unimportant to avoid serving on a jury’ problem: lots of the most interesting people to have there would have good arguments to not do so
Why would abolition of political parties make politics better? Look at politics before modern democracy and political parties. I personally can’t imagine something more mind-killing than court intrigues in, say, 18th century.
My problem with the proposed solution of “make that illegal” isn’t that it’s intellectual dreaming, it’s that it’s too practical and not abstract enough. Systems of people and their interactions flow in natural ways that can’t be brutally criminalized into nonexistence without disturbing the whole system.
Trying to solve a problem and then patching against the solution’s unintended consequences is the wrong approach, and it’s one engendered by not holding off with solutions and by zooming in on the party issue.
The way I think about things, “What other disadvantages are provided by the existence of political parties?” isn’t the right question. Advantages and disadvantages are relative to complete systems, and political parties are not preponderantly important as against all the other variables in the social system. Also, worlds without a particular set of laws are to be compared against worlds in which there is that set of laws: one such might be imprisonment for whipping votes, for example. Notably, one does not compare a world in which the criminalized behavior is absent, and in which all else remains static, to one in which the behavior is present.
Laws are either silly or legislating against something some people want to do (and others don’t want them to do). All laws are therefore suspect, particularly when they target an amorphous and undefinable thing like politicking. People naturally want to do these things, for valid game-theoretic reasons. Punishing doing them efficiently, punishing getting caught doing them, will not end the activity or the effects of the activity.
Just to be clear: You favor total anarchy? The conclusion of all your argument seems to be that nothing can be analyzed and nothing should be done, in general, for any problem. “It’s complex; therefore, you shouldn’t think about it.”
No.
It’s complex, therefore thoughts about it should probably be complex.
Banning proximate causes of ill is usually not a proposal that respects the complexities of a situation. It’s reminiscent of the war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on terrorism...just about the only thing that could be a more perniciously deranging political cause than a war on a random abstract noun is a war on politics itself. That takes all the usual problems to the meta level.
I had not expected that severe misinterpretation of what I wrote and notice my own surprise and stupidity.