Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM
I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections.
Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.
Also, chances are neither of the two parties fit what you want. Especially in the US it is basically choosing the lesser evil..
But yeah, I totally agree, it just seems like very narrow minded allegiance. I think in the US it has a lot to do with conflicting interests of people in high-density places and the rural. I've got a population map overlayed on election results right now, and the data seems to fit that conclusion.
"We" are all held, arbitrarily, in the same group, which is... Absurd. It's like a hostage situation and it seems nobody has recognized that we're being held involuntarily.
“I, candidate for office, align myself to and support the goals of the DNC, GOP, or XYZ” is pretty clearly political speech.
You could nibble away at the edges, maybe eliminate state support for primaries, change funding rules, but I think it’s ultimately not going away and probably not even getting diluted much if we keep the first past the post voting method.
Thinking along, could we perhaps rather vote on things that worry us, instead of people (or sometimes just a color) that may (likely not) do something about it? E.g. salary of teachers, climate change, etc.
And then every law/change has to be derived from that “wishlist”. Because political programs, while originally similar, have been misused greatly. It is still prone to abuse, but perhaps it would increase accountability of politicians and decrease the amount of laws that are only meant to distract the public from something much worse in the background. But surely everyone wants “free beer and immortality” (the program of a joke party where I live), so it would likely fail for other reasons, but a more direct democracy also has the shortcome of.. well, dumb people.
Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.
What voters say is disconnected from reality, because the average voter has average skill at articulating their thoughts and usually only knows how to navigate their own social context. That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast. It is really hard to outdo a democracy when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of what is really going on.
It is a gross unfairness in politics that people so often deal with sound bite caricatures of their opponents rather than being forthright about what motivates their position.
I might be off-base here, but I am unsure if you have thought through the ramifications of your statements. What your statement seems to be implicitly saying is that, (a few examples)
- Surgeons who stitch up gunshot wounds in ERs
- Doctors & nurse practitioners who deliver care to communities across the US
- Developers who write the critical code that runs airplanes
- Scientists & engineers who do nanoscale fabrication
- Environmental scientists embedded inside local communities, studying long-term environmental changes
- Embedded anthropologists studying populations & subcultures in Iraq & Afghanistan
- Poets and artists living in these communities
- Social scientists who study how rural Americans are used as a cheap workforce
- Developers at Google & DDG writing the code that allows billions of people to do work every day
- Scientists managing the US food supply and researching new ways to protect it,
- Devs at companies like Stripe that power significant parts of the US economy
The text also says that they don't "go out and do things in the real world."
It would be deeply wrong to assume that a random plumber or electrician is somehow lesser or incorrect by default. But it's also deeply wrong to say that the people who make important contributions that keep the lights of civilization on aren't somehow connected to reality by default.
I'm an engineer, I know the perspective well. I'm part of the group of people keeping the lights on. And therefore there is nearly nothing out there that poses any sort of threat to my comfort, because society was built by and for people like me. That isn't an experience that matches up well with the typical experience and it would be very hard to spin as being exposed to 'reality'. I have access to disproportionate resources to solve my problems. And so do all the people you're listing.
> That [average] voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
Now you're being more specific, saying those people who work outside "the real world," are those who are:
> Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience.
Why do you think that a fry cook or janitor has more "broad life experience" than a professor or a doctor? Do you think that there is something more "real" and "authentic" about manual labor, that intellectual labor lacks? Is scarcity the only source of authenticity?
In my experience, most people a born into, and live their entire lives, in a single social stratum. Maybe it's abject poverty, maybe it's menial labor, maybe it's middle-class, or maybe it's educated and professional. The classes live in constant fear and envy of each other, but very few people get to experience more than of them first-hand. There's insulation, as you point out, between the strata, but that doesn't mean that the uneducated and the poor are experiencing more reality, just that they're experiencing it differently.
It isn't a question of manual vs. non-manual in my mind. areoform was picking out a list of people who typically aren't exposed to the actual constraints because they are in the top ~10-20% of the social hierarchy, and usually only specialise in one specific area as opposed to understanding the total situation. Someone who has immanent and structural problems putting food on the table or keeping employment will have a much better idea of where the urgent pain points in an economy are than, say, a dev at Stripe.
The people close to the happy tail end of the distribution for comfortable lifestyles aren't going to have a good understanding of the median or hard tail. Some do, most don't. People who live the risk of doing without food have a much better understanding of how bad the current food shortages are than I do, for example. Despite being quite interested in the crisis I have to really go out and look to figure out whether the situation is normal, a little bit worse or immanent threat of large numbers of people who had food last year running out.
Basically, in short, it is easier for someone average to figure out what the experience is for the average person. Which is one of the most important experiences for figuring out whether a policy is working or not. The median voter is quite well connected to the experience of the median voter, much better than people like me who have to use statistics and guess what their experience is.
Thankyou for drawing my attention to the fact that my language was excessively vague.
Could you provide any specific examples of that?
Repeal Obamacare.
I don't think this is necessarily because those voters are stupid. It could be that they oppose the tax, and they will give whatever answer best signals "I oppose this tax", regardless of whether their answer is literally true. This is a reasonable strategy and it makes sense why they'd do it.
It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s.
I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.