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talkpoliticsThe United States, for all that we think of the two-party system as a continuous, stable pattern, has had a track record at least in its earlier years of seeing entire party systems collapse without trace.
The only one of the two Big Parties to last in a straight line pattern into the 21st Century is the Democrats, which originated as the Jeffersonian-era Democratic-Republicans, who ultimately dropped the second term from their name. The Dems, however, originated as the party of the countryside and the party of immigrants from the first. The Dems were always more willing to open their arms for more radical causes, as Andrew Jackson illustrated quite well when he created the Jacksonian Democracy with its first consolidated universal suffrage for all white people regardless of class in the 1830s, when this was actually unique in the world at the time.
The Dems, however, never had a consistently organized opposition until the rise of the Republicans. Their first opposition was the Federalists, who backed many of the same causes and people as the later Republicans, namely the establishment of a centralized Union with a consolidated financial system and backing commercial/industrial special interests instead of agriculture. The Federalists collapsed due to opposing the War of 1812, and were succeeded by the Whigs, who again backed commerce and industry instead of agriculture/slavery and immigrants. The Whigs lasted into the mid-19th Century, when they disintegrated over the slavery question. What made this crucial was that the disintegration was timed with the rise of both the North and the industrial sector of the US economy, which enabled the rise of the next opposition: the GOP.
The Republicans first appeared in Wisconsin, and consolidated the Northern Whigs with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, a combination that means GOP anti-immigrant rhetoric was *always* a component of the Republican Party, not an aberration. The GOP managed to exploit the disintegration of the previous party system to run as its first candidate one John C. Fremont, in its second try it actually elected its first President, Abraham Lincoln, and the Southern Democrats decided to skeedaddle because having ensured Lincoln was not on the ballot and refused to vote for him to deliberately ensure his election, he was elected, and so they discovered that an elected Lincoln was a threat.
So in the first half of the 19th Century the USA had three Party systems that rose and fell with regularity.
The reasons for this are simple: the United States electoral system of the time had both a smaller electorate and the US economic and political systems were in a strong state of flux. Since that time the only Third Party to really go anywhere was in the 1912 election and running purely on Teddy Roosevelt's charisma. Third Parties in the United States, under a flexible system together with the electoral college do not really have a chance to go anywhere.
Does this mean that votes for them are wasted? Technically no, it's a sign that people really do like other alternatives, though just because it's other doesn't mean it's any better. See, Constitution Party and most of the Libertarian Party candidates. However the problem that people who want those other alternatives to work have is simple: the US system was very efficiently designed to work against any kind of democratic choice on the part of the masses, and it was designed this way because its Founders loathed the concept of giving the People the right to decide for themselves.
While as the GOP showed it is possible for a Third Party to take over from the other two, this in turn does not work any more efficiently than elsewhere. However I'd note while I'm at it that the idea that parliamentary regimes avoid the two-party basis is not entirely truthful. Parliamentary regimes in Europe tend to have either Christian Democracy or a more conservative movement as the most powerful single force in the parliament and to regularly send these parties to Parliament with the highest slates of any single movement. When these systems deadlock, as in Belgium, or they have elections that are extremely close between the big parties, what happens is not any great spirit of amity or good will that is magically more extant in Europe than in the United States, but rather the little parties that are extremely fringe become the subject of suitors and decide things in themselves. This is not because the system favors little parties, it's because of the inability of the bigger ones to work together.
The grass is never greener on the other side, and the concept of building a representative assembly accountable to the people as oppose to special interests is a process that is really never-ending. However I do think that the idea that adopting a parliamentary system leads to greater accountability on the part of the parties to the people is itself a conceit of European devising that has been invalidated by phenomena such as Belgium's marathon without a government, and the last British election where nobody won because everybody hated everyone running.
Ultimately if societies want to fix their problems in this sense of accountability, they have to work on their own problems instead of mindlessly copying the systems of other societies and expecting difference to magically hand-wave all of the prior issues. Instead the new system will rapidly come complete with its own problems, and then the utopians wake up to the reality that the pigs that overthrew the farmer are now just as human as the farmer was.
The only one of the two Big Parties to last in a straight line pattern into the 21st Century is the Democrats, which originated as the Jeffersonian-era Democratic-Republicans, who ultimately dropped the second term from their name. The Dems, however, originated as the party of the countryside and the party of immigrants from the first. The Dems were always more willing to open their arms for more radical causes, as Andrew Jackson illustrated quite well when he created the Jacksonian Democracy with its first consolidated universal suffrage for all white people regardless of class in the 1830s, when this was actually unique in the world at the time.
The Dems, however, never had a consistently organized opposition until the rise of the Republicans. Their first opposition was the Federalists, who backed many of the same causes and people as the later Republicans, namely the establishment of a centralized Union with a consolidated financial system and backing commercial/industrial special interests instead of agriculture. The Federalists collapsed due to opposing the War of 1812, and were succeeded by the Whigs, who again backed commerce and industry instead of agriculture/slavery and immigrants. The Whigs lasted into the mid-19th Century, when they disintegrated over the slavery question. What made this crucial was that the disintegration was timed with the rise of both the North and the industrial sector of the US economy, which enabled the rise of the next opposition: the GOP.
The Republicans first appeared in Wisconsin, and consolidated the Northern Whigs with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, a combination that means GOP anti-immigrant rhetoric was *always* a component of the Republican Party, not an aberration. The GOP managed to exploit the disintegration of the previous party system to run as its first candidate one John C. Fremont, in its second try it actually elected its first President, Abraham Lincoln, and the Southern Democrats decided to skeedaddle because having ensured Lincoln was not on the ballot and refused to vote for him to deliberately ensure his election, he was elected, and so they discovered that an elected Lincoln was a threat.
So in the first half of the 19th Century the USA had three Party systems that rose and fell with regularity.
The reasons for this are simple: the United States electoral system of the time had both a smaller electorate and the US economic and political systems were in a strong state of flux. Since that time the only Third Party to really go anywhere was in the 1912 election and running purely on Teddy Roosevelt's charisma. Third Parties in the United States, under a flexible system together with the electoral college do not really have a chance to go anywhere.
Does this mean that votes for them are wasted? Technically no, it's a sign that people really do like other alternatives, though just because it's other doesn't mean it's any better. See, Constitution Party and most of the Libertarian Party candidates. However the problem that people who want those other alternatives to work have is simple: the US system was very efficiently designed to work against any kind of democratic choice on the part of the masses, and it was designed this way because its Founders loathed the concept of giving the People the right to decide for themselves.
While as the GOP showed it is possible for a Third Party to take over from the other two, this in turn does not work any more efficiently than elsewhere. However I'd note while I'm at it that the idea that parliamentary regimes avoid the two-party basis is not entirely truthful. Parliamentary regimes in Europe tend to have either Christian Democracy or a more conservative movement as the most powerful single force in the parliament and to regularly send these parties to Parliament with the highest slates of any single movement. When these systems deadlock, as in Belgium, or they have elections that are extremely close between the big parties, what happens is not any great spirit of amity or good will that is magically more extant in Europe than in the United States, but rather the little parties that are extremely fringe become the subject of suitors and decide things in themselves. This is not because the system favors little parties, it's because of the inability of the bigger ones to work together.
The grass is never greener on the other side, and the concept of building a representative assembly accountable to the people as oppose to special interests is a process that is really never-ending. However I do think that the idea that adopting a parliamentary system leads to greater accountability on the part of the parties to the people is itself a conceit of European devising that has been invalidated by phenomena such as Belgium's marathon without a government, and the last British election where nobody won because everybody hated everyone running.
Ultimately if societies want to fix their problems in this sense of accountability, they have to work on their own problems instead of mindlessly copying the systems of other societies and expecting difference to magically hand-wave all of the prior issues. Instead the new system will rapidly come complete with its own problems, and then the utopians wake up to the reality that the pigs that overthrew the farmer are now just as human as the farmer was.
(no subject)
Date: 4/11/12 20:29 (UTC)One glaring example: Just because anti-immigrant rhetoric was in the GOP early on and again today does not mean it was "always" there. Woodrow Wilson alienated a lot of non-WASP's from the Democrats, and they turned to the Republicans. The Bushes today are pro-immigration Republicans. The GOP has changed repeatedly over time, and if it's meandered back into nativism, that doesn't mean it's always been there rhetorically, even if there have always been a few nativists who voted GOP for other reasons.
And your conclusion, that the grass is "never" greener on the other side is laughable. Why ever borrow reforms then? Adopting the Australian ballot? The rise of democratic systems and universal suffrage around the world? "No, needn't have bothered, underlankers says the grass is never greener." This is obvious drivel.
As for the "two-party system":
In a winner-take-all system, you may really end up with multiple one-party districts in federation with each other, If the parties are balanced nationally, it's because people try to make it that way. But if parties are strongly tied to ideology or ethnicity, then they will tend not be of equal size naturally. The present USA system of winner-take-all plurality elections with ideological parties should be expected to give one-party rule in a significant number of states, as it has. Each party has partisans who assume that a similar opportunity awaits on a national level, hence the crowing about a coming majority of one or the other. But in fact, the parties are relatively evenly split nationally, and in the polls, even in one-party strongholds.
A system designed to make representation proportional (a word you failed to use, possibly because it doesn't appear in your historical worldview) would undermine the present assumption in our one-party states, that governance belongs completely to the dominant culture, no matter how many people vote for an alternative. (Note that the rise of the GOP in the South is in part a rebranding of the boll weevils and latter-day Bourbon Democrats dominant in some counties, as the old party aligned more to blacks and populist progressives. That it means a two-party split in the South does not mean those counties aren't one-party still.)
(no subject)
Date: 4/11/12 20:37 (UTC)Noting that the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence equaling stagnation always and forever is itself another extreme simplification. Just because it's not greener does not mean that the people on the other side of the fence did not and do not have good ideas. However since you brought up the Australian ballot, that it was adopted didn't forbid the massive bloodshed aimed at keeping black people subordinate in the most ruthless of ways until the 1960s or protect their rights to vote legally guaranteed by Constitutional Amendments, did it? The rise of universal suffrage here didn't happen until the black men and women were guaranteed their rights to vote, which were already there, were actually going to be enforced. Simply having the concepts meant nothing.
Yet in practice you still have two major parties and a number of little ones, just like in the United States, and parliamentary legislatures are no more respectful or prone to working together than the US Congress is, often rather less so, in fact. I would agree that in large parts of the South the only thing that changed was the label on the one party, and it's why I think Democrats will take a long time to be re-elected here in Louisiana, as they have to learn what contesting an election means.
Proportional Representation is not used because in practice it is to a great extent unworkable. How, for instance, does one handle delicate issues like parts of a US state with huge minority populations or Hawaii where whites remain in the majority as they have for decades, and as such should be a minority at all levels? How does one district things by proportion of the population in practice when this means in a particular country that only a few states gain an overwhelming preponderance of power the other states won't grant due to the usual political factors, regardless of any rationality in that prospect (and of course those states are not themselves a unified bloc but this counter-argument never matters to the people raising the first counter-argument as theirs is not a logical view but one based on fears of might-have-beens and could-be-but-is-not-right-nows.
(no subject)
Date: 4/11/12 21:11 (UTC)http://xkcd.com/1127/large/
(no subject)
Date: 4/11/12 21:17 (UTC)To claim that the American Revolution or Jacksonian era fit into modern categorizations is even dumber, as the American Revolution was both a foreign war and a civil war, and during its timeframe the USA did not have coherent political parties. Washington's Administration didn't have them, and Adams and Jefferson both formed and codified them. Jackson's universal democracy for white men was concurrent with his browbeating South Carolina into shutting the Hell up over secession and his continuing with conservative policies of the time otherwise.
Presentism is a historical fallacy, and that graph is a hideous example of it.
(no subject)
Date: 5/11/12 02:13 (UTC)I do like one aspect of the pre-party system, the fact that everyone ran for president, but first and second place in the Electoral got President and Vice-President respectively. I like that system because it allowed for multiple candidates. Research has shown that in a more-than-two runner campaign, going negative doesn't work. Candidates that go negative have to go negative on more than one opponent, meaning everything they say is negative. People usually don't vote for an all-negative candidate.
Second, there are few people who can run for pres, let alone VP. Letting them all run and picking the top two gets more able candidates in the race.
Also, our current party system consolidates too much power in the higher executive branch. When the President and Vice President can break the Senate tie (with the VP/President of the Senate voting the admin position) and sign the legislation, too much power leaves the legislative branch. The president should have his most able opponent as VP, not a chosen lacky.
(no subject)
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Date: 5/11/12 23:23 (UTC)The Parliamentary system generally still favours two political Party's more than the rest, although the seats won by third ( fourth and fifth) parties do tend to have more relevance.
(no subject)
Date: 6/11/12 02:18 (UTC)Edit-Dammit Livejournal, don't keep an icon like that.
(no subject)
Date: 6/11/12 05:08 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 6/11/12 12:29 (UTC)