The problem is the people have no representation, what people want does not impact the likelihood of passage of a law.[1]

People on the left in right have a lot more in common with each other than everyone likes to make out. But even where they agree still nothing happens. I think this “polarization” line is a convenient distraction from this reality.

[1] https://bulletin.represent.us/american-government-isnt-democ...

The only way out I see is through constitution-level campaign finance reform, replacing multilayered first past the post, and probably reducing the power of the presidency so this new many-party Congress actually matters rather than so much power in a single (and thus winner takes all) office.

Edit: as another unrepresented belief, if I think Israel is a geniciding state that deserves no international support, well, too bad, the center of both parties if firmly in the pockets of pro Israeli interest groups.

Do those people really care and work for their voters? Or for their own career (including post-political career at some company they've done favors), lobbies, party, etc?

Not that I follow this closely, but last i heard the Median Voter Theorem was still holding up well in the research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem

Caveat: I'm just some guy who reads web pages, not a voting scientist.

The US has a long history, almost all of it with a two-party system. Only sometimes is there extremity. To my mind, 1860 is even more extreme than today.

(My opinion is that an important common thread between then and today is a class of people with a great deal of money who are deliberately driving the political atmosphere. But in any event a claim that it is a natural outcome of a two-party system needs to account for the historical fact that the US experience is typically not extreme.)

There's extensive literature on what's been driving polarization, but it really is a new "era" for it and not a cyclical thing. Factors include:

- More democratic/open primaries, which select extreme candidates

- More statistically targeted media (including social media) to take advantage of extreme views (including social media)

- Increasingly partisan news media made possible by more fragmented media (first cable, then the Internet)

None of these show any signs of going away, and all three are phenomena that are fundamentally new in the past few decades.

Isn’t the entire mainstream media owned by only like 6 corporations[1]?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/these-6...

There's a lot more news outlets than there used to be when I was a kid. No question about that.

True.

Moderation is no solution at all when you think about it. I mean what's the compromise? They have to be slaves 3.5 days out of the week? And you can teach them to write, but any reading is strictly forbidden. So under no circumstances can you teach them to read?

Just hard to come up with any compromise that doesn't just sound ludicrous on its face.

Contrariwise:

Compensated emancipation was typically enacted as part of an act that outlawed slavery outright or established a scheme whereby slavery would eventually be phased out. It frequently was accompanied or preceded by laws which approached gradual emancipation by granting freedom to those born to slaves after a given date. Among the European powers, slavery was primarily an issue with their overseas colonies. The British Empire enacted a policy of compensated Emancipation for its colonies in 1833, followed by Denmark, France in 1848, and the Netherlands in 1863. Most South American and Caribbean nations emancipated slavery through compensated schemes in the 1850s and 1860s, while Brazil passed a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation in 1871, and Cuba followed in 1880 after having enacted freedom at birth a decade earlier.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensated_emancipation

I mean, there's still slaves.

"Your kids can be free! But only the ones born after the next Vernal Equinox falling on a Tuesday. Oh, and by the way, You can never be free."

Again, a solution that's ludicrous on its face and doesn't really get rid of slavery. Kind of like the compromise we had here, where you could "technically" have slaves in the North. (Of course, occasionally in the North, your neighbors came by to kill you and take your slaves to Canada. But you could have them.) Obviously, it just turned out to be not a very workable solution. Like any compromise on an issue like that. There were just a whole lot of people out there taking that whole "..then, thenceforward, and forever free.." thing deadly seriously.

Either you have slavery or you don't. It's kind of binary. You really can't go into a roomful of pregnant high school girls and pick out the one who is the "most virgin" is kind of my point. It's ludicrous to think that you can.

> So in other words, still slavery. Right?

.., which suggests you overlooked the first leg of the OR clause:

> Compensated emancipation was typically enacted as part of an act that outlawed slavery outright

But maybe I am not understanding you. If an act outlaws slavery outright, is it your view that there are still slaves?

You also write ...

> ... and doesn't really get rid of slavery.

.., but the historical record shows that compensated emancipation did get rid of lawful slavery.

Let's flip this around to today: imagine a hypothetical future 100 years from now, that honors the qualitative dignity of all animal life, and views factory farming with the same horror that we view slavery now. From this moral vantage point (even as a meat eater, I concede this position the high ground), a phased approach seems appalling.

We currently slaughter roughly one Holocaust's worth of animals every hour; how about reducing it to one Holocaust per two hours? Maybe a new law to give cows an hour in the sunshine before they're herded back into pens? What about voluntary buyback programs? Taxes on meat to subsidize cheaper vegetables? These are all quantitative solutions to a qualitative problem: either cows have inalienable value as conscious beings, or they don't; and if they do, shouldn't we stop at nothing to defend that sacred value and eliminate all human-caused animal suffering, rather than wishy-washy incrementalism?

The unfortunate reality then and now is that we're stuck in quantitative games, directly or indirectly. There are no shortage of highly motivated consumers and producers who benefit from factory farming, just as as there was for slavery. There was clear justification to go to war to end slavery, to forcibly grind the game entirely to a halt; but it was not without cost, not only in lives lost, but in a consequential cultural rift that persists to this day. I'm both ignorant and curious how culture played out in those societies that use phased approaches; do they have equivalents to the "Southern Strategy" and Nixon's racially-motivated War on Drugs (which is rightly, I think, compared to modern-day slavery)?

I don't claim to know the answers to any of these things; but until a given moral phase-shift takes place, it's not always obvious how to get there, and a hardline stance can run the risk that the system kicks back, opponents are strengthened and galvanized, and nothing is accomplished.

(Yes, I'm aware of the irony and offense of invoking a comparison to farm animals in a discussion of slavery, when slaves were once viewed as livestock. I'm attempting to draw the opposite point: of humanizing animals, in the same way that we now humanize all homo sapiens regardless of ethnicity.)

Travel to Asia or Africa, and ask who the leader of the US was when the slaves were freed? Then ask who the leader of the British Empire was when their slaves were freed? Or the leader of Brazil? There's a reason people in Asia revere Lincoln and not the leader of the British Empire, or the leader of Brazil at the time, or the leader of Cuba, or what have you. That reason is because Lincoln is viewed as having done the right thing in the face of enormous risk. We did the right thing in a way that transcended America. It even transcended the slaves to be perfectly frank. What we did has inspired humanity ever since. Whether you are at an elite University in Beijing, Shanghai, or Singapore, Lincoln is a leader all of the most promising students are drawn to.

This is not simply the result of marketing either. For instance, the king of Siam was famously drawn to Lincoln over all of the others as well. The Czar lamented his comparison to Lincoln. Insisting people should instead venerate him, because he had done more for the serfs than Lincoln did for the slaves. And he felt he'd certainly done more than the British or the Portuguese, who he felt had done nothing at all. All of this was long before professional marketing really existed. Even long before the US was really even a power. So our solution to slavery paid us off over a thousandfold in untold influence and soft power alone. Influence and soft power throughout the world. Now, I'll concede that it's influence and soft power that we seem to have squandered, but it's also influence these wishy washy incrementalist approaches never conferred on their proponents.

You say it was a cost, (and presumably a loss?). I think you might believe that because you haven't properly accounted for the many benefits we've enjoyed in your cost-benefit analysis.

Only if you consider a million lives lost, and many more wounded, "better" than the solution other countries with slavery, like Great Britain, adopted: they paid off the slaveowners and freed their slaves without any violence at all.

Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence?

Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, and global scale violence. It was kind of a necessity for that kind of thing to work.

It's real violence, sure, but it's there in all of the cases, so it drops out of the comparison we're making. We're not talking about the costs of slavery itself; we're talking about the costs to end slavery. A million lives seems to me like a much bigger cost to end slavery then paying off the slaveowners.

Not to mention the fact that all those other countries that didn't have to fight a war to end slavery ended it sooner than the US did; so actually we should be considering the costs of slavery itself--for all the extra years that it existed in the US compared to those other countries. Which just makes the "fight a war to end slavery" option look even worse by comparison.

And I mean come on guy? What's with these ideas? Any violence against slaves just "drops out". But other violence does not? We should pay off slaver owners? A million lives is too much to pay to end slavery?

A million lives is far less than the body count of 400 years of the slave trade. How many lived and died as slaves? How many were killed, beaten, or left for dead? Or maybe just thrown overboard? etc etc etc.

As to the question of paying off slave owners, what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom? You either didn't pay attention in history class, or you are willfully ignoring the nature of how we got our start. Presumably because it is inconvenient, and doesn't fit with your narrative.

And, yeah, on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves, that's just not even worth commentary.

But hey man, we can just agree to disagree. Obviously we're just different people. You have a nice rest of the day.

Paying off the slaveowners is not just an "idea". It actually happened. In every other country that ended slavery. That's why I'm drawing the comparison. Every other country managed to end slavery without fighting a war that cost a million lives. So why did the US have to?

> what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom?

You're missing my point. Of course it wasn't our policy to pay money for freedom. That's why we had to fight a war that cost a million lives to free the slaves.

My point is, why wasn't it our policy to pay money for freedom? Why couldn't we do the obvious thing that all the other countries did to free slaves without it having to cost a million lives?

And if your answer is "we should never pay money for freedom", why not? The slaves were freed either way. Wasn't freeing them the goal? Wouldn't it be better to achieve that goal without it having to cost a further million lives?

> on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves

You're missing my point again. I'm not ignoring the violence against slaves. I'm pointing out that that violence happened regardless of how the slaves were freed. So when counting the cost of freeing the slaves, you can't factor in the violence that happened while they were slaves, because that violence had already happened; freeing the slaves with a war that cost a million lives didn't make any of the violence against the slaves while they were slaves go away, any more than paying the slaveowners for the slaves' freedom did. The million lives it cost in the US Civil War wasn't instead of the 400 years of violence against the slaves; it was in addition to it.

You don't negotiate with terrorists.

Maybe I should just ask you to get a better idea of how you're thinking about this whole thing, do you think we should have paid the British?

So you think the slaveowners were terrorists? You think the British in Colonial times were terrorists? On what basis?

> do you think we should have paid the British?

I answered this in another part of this subthread: yes, if the British would have accepted payment in exchange for our independence, and we could have afforded the payment, we should have paid them.

Uh... on the basis of them beating, torturing and even killing slaves maybe? Or again, are we not counting any terrorism against slaves?

I mean, what would you call slavery but terrorism? Violence to achieve and maintain a political objective. What is war but terrorism really? When you're dealing with a terrorist, you use their tactics and prove to them you're willing to go further.

But coming to the central point, I think it's clear we just disagree fundamentally about when it's appropriate to use treasury to pay settlements. Paying terrorists or bullies is completely inappropriate. Paying someone you may have wronged inadvertently, or paying for land, is more appropriate. So paying, say, France for Louisiana, or Russia for Alaska, is entirely appropriate. It's just making an offer for a piece of land that's not ours. We don't own it. We don't farm it. We weren't the people making that land valuable. But we wanted to move there so we could do so. An offer of purchase is appropriate under those circumstances.

But paying southerners to free slaves, is tantamount to paying a kidnapper to release their hostages. If you're smart, you just don't do that. The only thing it does is embolden other kidnappers.

And paying someone for land you live on, you farm, and you make valuable, but they take the profit off of it with no input from you at all? Yeah, that's not even something you should consider doing. Just as you shouldn't pay mafia "protection" fees. It's just asking for more trouble down the line.

But you and I just think differently about these things. No worries. I just firmly believe if you tried to do things your way, you would find in very short order that the world is not unicorns and rainbows. There are significant dangers to doing business with bad actors.

So by your definition, the Union fighting a war to free the slaves was terrorism. So your argument is basically to fight terrorism with more terrorism.

> paying southerners to free slaves, is tantamount to paying a kidnapper to release their hostages. If you're smart, you just don't do that. The only thing it does is embolden other kidnappers.

This claim is obviously false when applied to paying slaveowners to free slaves. Great Britain and other countries paying slaveowners to free slaves did not embolden other slaveowners. In fact it did the opposite.

> paying someone for land you live on, you farm, and you make valuable, but they take the profit off of it with no input from you at all?

Huh? We're not talking about the slaves buying their freedom. (Although that did happen in the South--it wasn't common, but it happened.) We're talking about the United States Government paying the slaveowners to buy the freedom of the slaves, in exchange for the slaveowners' agreement to outlaw slavery. Just like Great Britain did with its slaveowners. Do you even understand what actually happened in the latter case?

> you and I just think differently about these things

As far as I can tell, you are thinking not about what I actually proposed, but about straw man versions that you have made up.

Yes, exactly. Some nations were willing to tell their moralizers to shut up, and just pay off the slaveowners. The US wasn't willing to make that compromise; we let the moralizers drive the process, so we had to fight a war and kill a million people.

Yeah, "moralizers" like Hamilton, Washington, and Ben Franklin, who were so obstinate and short sighted they refused to simply pay the British Crown instead of fighting such a destructive war. Too bad you couldn't be there to show them the error of their ways.

/s

Yeah, this is another case where you and I are just different people. We'll just agree to disagree. Have a nice day though.

You think the Colonies could have paid the British Crown to become independent? Where are you getting that from? What makes you think the British would have accepted it?

But if you are just asking as a pure hypothetical--should the Colonies have paid for independence, if the British would have accepted that resolution--then my answer would be yes, of course. Independence was the goal; if we could have gotten there without having to fight a war, so much the better.

But no, I don't believe we should have paid the British either. Of course not. Pay off every world power hard up for money that comes along? No way. You start off that way, you've set yourself up for extreme and painful failure. Best to have one war at the outset so that all the other global powers get the message loud and clear.

You can try paying off bullies if you like in your own life, but I can guarantee you that it won't work. The only thing it will create is more opportunists.

You're being a bit naive man.

I have not proposed any such thing. Being willing to pay money for a specific valuable objective--independence for the American Colonies, freedom for the slaves of the American South--is not at all the same as being willing to pay money to anyone who comes along and asks for it.

> You can try paying off bullies

So you think the British were bullying the American Colonies? You think the South was bullying the North before the Civil War? On what basis?

If you look at the historical record, you will see that, if anything, it was the Colonies bullying the British until the British got fed up, and the Northern abolitionists bullying the South until the South got fed up.

> You're being a bit naive man.

No, I'm simply taking to its logical conclusion a premise that seems obvious to me: that paying for something with money, if you can, is better than paying for it with human lives.

So it's disingenuous to say that 1860 was like today. It wasn't. At all. There is no new, powerful, upstart party that people can vote for to get away from the extremists today. There is no overriding issue that people can legitimately claim to be at once barbaric and deleterious to the republic. There is none of that.

We just have two parties... who choose to be extreme for dubious reasons.

So it hasn't been as polarized as it is today, ever really during the two party era. Today is way outside the norm. We haven't seen anything like this before.

Of course, we've never had anything like our current leaders either. But that's a whole other issue. (A related issue though.)

Outside of wartime, the federal government was something you mainly interacted with when going to the post office. If the national politicians hated each other, it made for good gossip, but didn't affect daily life much

Today, it is involved with and regulating most aspects of our lives, and federal government dysfunction is a much bigger problem.

Quadratic voting weights power away from my-way-or-highway voters towards voters who are willing to consider more than one option. Without thinking too deeply, it would make it easy to tease apart large and awkward alliances. Even if it didn't formally fracture the major parties, it would de-facto moderate politics by increasing the risk of holding extreme positions.

Basically any other form of voting is an improvement over the US FPTP system; FPTP's only advantage is that it is very obvious how it works. Nothing to sneeze at, but not mathematically satisfying.

I don't think this is supported by the evidence. Polarization in the US hasn't been unidirectional (there are many long periods during which the US became less polarized) and the recent massive spike is, well, a recent spike--it's not a natural evolution at all. Something happened in the last twenty years or so that increased our polarization. I recall several good sources, but I'll have to dig around for them...

I'd expand the timeframe to 30 years and say the biggest contributors to this are the rise of neoliberal politics combined with globalization leaving a lot of working class people "behind" while corporations made ever more and more profits, combined with the rise of the Internet where the most outrageous content gets the most clicks/likes/eyeball-time with next to no institutions to provide as "quality filter".

Stuff like antivaxxers, flat earthers, "great exchange of the white people" and other conspiracy bollocks was relegated to physical mailings of fringe groups naturally limiting its distribution, nowadays the reach capability is in the millions for everyone.

In addition, countless fuck-ups (aided by propaganda) demolished trust into journalism and experts in general, which led to the erosion of fact-based viewpoints as the base for democratic discourse.

What is this referring to?

This has happened all over the world. The obvious major thing that's changed is this thing right here: The internet.

Social media has replaced "mainstream media" as the source of our news and our opinions. And so we have a new opinion landscape.

This gives license to all sorts of denialism and conspiracy theories--the right denies climate change, the left denies biological gender differences, and both sides have their anti-vaxxers and flat-earth theorists. Without common "truths" to counter our tribalist tendencies, we are being pulled toward extremes.

Suppose I belong to minority group X (say people with a rare disease, LGBT, immigrants...) whose life will literally change by approving or rejecting a bill.

On the other side, a similarly sized group Y strongly opposes the first group out of first principles from their ideology (reducing taxes, sanctity of heterosexual marriage, keeping the country "pure"). Usually this group will have strong opinions against several of those social issues, but none of them will really affect their lives directly. So, their votes will be divided among several issues.

Therefore, the votes of a small group will decide the outcome in their benefit on those issues that strongly affect them, unless:

1) an equal opposing group has the same extreme incentives (and in that case, the opinion of the overall population will decide), or

2) the opposing group is much larger than the small group.

I'd say that, in both cases, it is reasonable to think that the system is working as it should.

This is the exact opposite of what economic theory predicts and my (admittedly biased) personal observations. Consider for example Hoetelling's Law, which states that competitors naturally tend to become as similar as possible in order to extract as much value from the competition as possible: https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2692.htm

The advantage of systems other than the two party system is precisely that they allow more diverse view points to be represented.

> g Likert has never done; engages a higher level of thoughtfulness; attenuates extremism to expose deeper insight; and predicts behavior better than Likert at high levels preference intensity.

Basically extreme views and polarization are poorly weighted in large populations and this can be _exposed_ by QV.

Besides, if the people want to put someone in office, shouldn't they be allowed to? Isn't that Democracy 101?

Voters can restore someone to office, but each term must stand alone, avoiding the, "What does every first-term President want? A second term." problem.

It also forces clearer the revolving door between the private sector and politics as then the no-longer congressperson gets hired into a company.

Yeah, those people are called "voters". That's how it's supposed to work. We want congresspeople to feel beholden to them.

> It also forces clearer the revolving door between the private sector and politics as then the no-longer congressperson gets hired into a company.

Isn't this just motivation for more cronyism? You're basically arguing that the last term of any congressperson should be spent working for a company instead of the people.

No it's not. It's to the people with money which let's them get to the voters. Because otherwise that money is going to an alternate candidate that plays ball. Have you ever wondered where the blue-collar Democrats of the 1970's went, for example? Businesses and those with money instead financing better campaigns in return for business representation, won. It's why both Democrats and Republicans have generally represented corporate interests since Reagan.

> Isn't this just motivation for more cronyism?

No, it's motivation for making the existing cronyism even more transparent. Or, incentivizing those who did their terms to return to the communities they helped represent and move on with their non-political life.

Term limits already exist for other positions. It is not a strange concept.

> roundabout

My problem is not with "money in politics", it is with career politicians.

> more difficult to implement

Forgive my laughter, setting a term limits is way easier than your abstract idealism of removing money from politics.

> antidemocratic

Everyone can still vote and is still emancipated. The America after the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution is no less a Representative Democracy than before.

I'm all for honest and open discussion but it is clear this is not one of them.

But TV ads are expensive, hence the several million dollars each candidate spends every election cycle.

Oh, and have Senators be appointed by state governments again, like they used to be.

The power to make laws is going to go somewhere. If the legislature won't or can't accept it, it'll end up in the bureaucracy (admittedly a huge problem with out non-term limited national Congress, though for different reasons), or in the case I'm familiar with, by executive fiat and outside groups and lobbyists.

If you're in tribe A, your media tells you tribe B are literally devils. There's no understanding a devil, or compromise with one. If they say something that sounds reasonable? It's probably a trick. Hannity or Maddow will explain why tonight.

There is something very sad, yet true, about that statement.

The federal government has been corrupt my entire life. I don't see any reason to give them additional money or power.

If anything, I find national liberals wrong, and state liberals more correct.

I wouldn't mind paying for things my area uses, I have some oversight.

Nationally trillions of dollars gets lost.