"Is the Two-Party System Doomed?"

[S.E. TN Liberal]

"...Four times in recent history, we've had presidential elections end either in nearly perfect statistical ties (Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Nixon-Humphrey in 1968) or in contests close enough where there was a disparity between electoral and popular votes (Bush-Gore 2000, and Clinton-Trump 2016).

As Noam Chomsky wrote after the Bush/Gore fiasco, about the only scenario where you'd expect to see a contest of a hundred-plus million voters end in a statistical tie would either be a completely random process, or one where voters were asked to make a choice about something totally unrelated to their lives,..."...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-piketty-study-is-two-party-system-doomed-w518585

[still_one]

1. F**K Matt Taibbi, who went out of his way to undermine and encourage people NOT to vote for the

Democratic nominee.

What is doomed is the frauds like Taibbi, Stein, Greenwald , and other false prophets

Interesting that all three believe that the Russian investigation is akin the McCarthyism. They are so full of shit it is pathetic

[Blue_Tires]

6. +1

He wasn't the only one, either...

Taibbi needs to STFU about politics for awhile... He and Glenn are still hardcore KremlinGate denialists, too

[ehrnst]

8. +1000

[DanTex]

2. Apparently Matt Taibbi now thinks that Social Security is a "social issue"...

American politicians for decades have done an outstanding job of keeping low-income voters from seeing their shared economic dilemmas. The Republicans dating back to Goldwater and Nixon have kept voters transfixed with race hatred and fears about things like gun control, while Democrats have emphasized the Republican threat on social issues like reproductive rights and Social Security.

This is indicative of how far tools like Taibbi will go in order to draw false equivalencies between the parties.

[unblock]

3. this is a flawed analysis. mathematically, a two-party system should be tied or nearly so often.

chomsky (a genius but evidently not much of a game theoretician) seems to be working under the premise that the parties can't change and that voters organize themselves around static parties.

but the parties are supposed to adapt and constantly be trying to gain a majority. they therefore should seek the center. if one party goes too far left or too far right, then the other party can claim the middle and win everything on the other side as well, giving them an easy majority.

the game theory optimal solution is for the two parties to be side-by-side in the middle, leading to very close elections.


think of two ice cream shops on a beach. if either sets up too far to one side, the other sets up in the middle and gets more business.
optimal for the stores is for the shops to be side-by-side in the middle. that's not optimal for the customers, but if either shop moves a bit over, then the other shop can follow it and do more business, and that's worse for the customers over all.


what we have now is a different problem; republicans are marching ever further to the right. democrats are claiming the middle and then some, but we're not winning enough elections because republicans are cheating (disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, vote rigging, fake scandalizing, screwing around with registrations, etc.).

[Caliman73]

5. Cheating is the correct term.

There is a fundamental difference between what Democratic Party ideals and Republican Party ideals are. Each party also has members who affiliate with them based on identification, tradition, etc..., who have wider ranging ideas than each party typically campaigns on. There are Republicans who are pro-choice as there are Democrats who are for private ownership of firearms.

The major difference between the parties is the question, "What should be the function of government?"

- Republicans, through their policies, appear to believe that government should be used to secure the wealth and prosperity of the wealthiest people, to protect access to markets through the use of diplomacy and/or military force, to regulate the behavior of women, minorities, and other groups they deem to need that control, for the preservation of "traditional (White Male Protestant values).

- Democrats, through their policies, appear to believe that government should be used to provide opportunities for most people to have housing, food, gainful employment, and some opportunities for leisure. That government should regulate behaviors that are harmful to society (I. E. Smoking, guns, GMO's). Now some of those "harmful" things may be debatable and the extent of the regulations are also debatable, but for brevity I put that general statement in. Democrats see government as a force for as much equity as can be obtained without completely trampling on individual liberties.

To me, those are fundamental differences and as I said, there are Democrats who tend to espouse more of the Republican ideals, and there at least, used to be Republicans who were more moderate and had a blend of Democratic and Republican ideals.

HOWEVER, as you stated. Republicans CANNOT win, espousing their view of government because it doesn't serve many people. So, they cheat. They cheat through lying. They cheat through dirty political tactics like gerrymandering. They cheat through straight up voter suppression and elections fraud. They rely on the worst qualities of people, hate, fear, racism, sexism, jingoism, xenophobia, homophobia, Christian Dominionism, and greed to cobble together their coalition. They have been chipping away at the public education system to keep people from being informed citizens. They deride universities and anything that doesn't sell their platform as "elitist" and "liberal" or "radical left".

[unblock]

7. got that right.

[frazzled]

4. Lost me at "were asked to make a choice about something totally unrelated to their lives."

I've been around the block enough to know that a lot of voters (and people who don't vote) have a million different stories about why politics doesn't relate to their lives: "My son listens to too much rap and is doing bad in school"; "My wife left me and won't let me see my kids." Those are real answers to interviews with real voters, made while canvassing, when asked what issue in the elections was most important to them. And no—no politician will be able to address these problems for them (sorry). But the fact remains that the issues that politicians do discuss (no matter which side of the fence they are on)—the economy, education, taxes, foreign policy, race, immigration—actually DO impact their lives. They just don't know it (or don't care, because they are singularly focused on personal issues outside the political realm).

The real reason for this trend toward split-down-the-middle elections, imo, has to do with tribalism ... and that leads to, you guessed it, issues of race (and associated issues of sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia). While Piketty (via Taibbi) focuses entirely on economic issues, he misses the boat entirely, claiming that the new division reflected in the last election rests largely on the "high-education, high-income" (who now vote left) and "low-education, low-income" (who now vote right).

Well, no. At least not if you look beyond white voters (here we go with race again): Black voters (who are not uniformly high income/high education nor low income/low education) voted 88% for Clinton (for black women, 94%; for black men 80%). And the same goes for educational status, where Piketty's formula is pretty much reversed:

Traditional thinking going into the election seemed to be that voters who had reached higher levels in their education were more likely to vote for Clinton, with Trump likely to draw in votes from those without a college degree. And nationally, the exit polls reflect that: 52% of college graduates cast their ballot for Hillary, and she earned 58% of votes cast by those with a postgraduate education.

But votes among African-Americans show a different trend, with black college graduates voted for Clinton at a smaller margin than black voters as a whole. Black women without college degrees were the most strongly in favor of Clinton, giving her 95% of their vote (compared to 91% for black women with a degree), while black men with a college degree gave only 78% of their votes to Clinton and 16% to Trump. This may be due to the fact that Democrats' positions often favor low-income populations, whereas educated African-Americans with a higher socioeconomic status may be more inclined to vote for more conservative economic policies.

https://mic.com/articles/159402/here-s-a-break-down-of-how-african-americans-voted-in-the-2016-election#.t24B3ud8i

Recent studies have shown that Trump voters did NOT vote on economic issues, but rather on the sense of their privilege as either white or male or straight or the "real Americans" was being eroded (not by the banks or mortgage lenders but by the rise in visibility and power of women, people of color, and people with funny names). Today's party divisions, indeed, are based largely on whether people feel threatened by a the idea of a nation in which people of other races, genders, or country of origin are gaining in status, to the detriment of their own; or whether people view this all as a continuation of the American experiment in equality and perfecting the nation. Just mho.