Most of the discussions of the actual historical dynamics around Duverger's in the US are grounded in the 1912 and 1992 presidential elections. Some time on Google Scholar with those dates and Duverger's Law as keywords might net you some more granular and nuanced analyses of the combined mechanisms involved.
lj - The Duverger’s Law links are interesting, but isn’t it a bit overdetermined? The US is the key example of a 2 party state (which is rather rare) and so it must be first past the post that decides it? That doesn’t really get at how the system tends to reinforce itself.
From the Duverger's Law article I linked to:
Does Duvager’s law still hold in the USA?
Of course, this does throw up some interesting questions about the US and the prospects for new parties like Andrew Yang and his ‘Yang Gang’. By any stretch, the US is a very large, complicated country with 50 individual states and many cleavages. Even with First Past the Post, we would expect a country like the US to have some degree of multi-partyism, or at least different two-partyism in some states (similar to India). Yet it is one of only a few sizeable countries to have a true two-party system at both the electoral and parliamentary level.
This is because third parties in America struggle with far more restrictions than simply First Past the Post. The main two parties are heavily institutionalised to the extent of nearly being a de facto part of the constitution. Internal party elections are designed and conducted by state agencies, voters officially register their party support with the government and restrictive ballot access rules decide who can stand for election. This is compounded by the structure of Congress and media debate. The two-party system is such a deeply ingrained part of the American political system that its causes and stability go far beyond the constraining effects of any voting system.
CharlesWT is correct to note that the two parties make it hard for other parties to gain access to the ballot. Systems of closed primaries and restrictive rules on how to get placed on the ballot in the first place tend to keep third parties from gaining any momentum. It's the same uphill battle every election cycle, and the small parties have a lot less infrastructure and a lot fewer people to do the important organizing work.
So there is the "mechanical effect" of Duverger's Law (represented in the victory conditions of the voting rules that are baked into the constitution), and the "psychological effect" of seeing what happens when a third party manages to cause enough disruption to their next closest aligned party that the only net effect is to boost the party that is least aligned.
The Democratic Socialists are getting a bit of momentum by employing "fusion candidacies" whereby they endorse Democrats in areas where they have insufficient support or less effective candidates, and running Democratic Socialist candidates as Democratic contenders in Democratic primaries where they do have support.
The acrimony towards Sanders is partly because this strategy is working for the Democratic Socialists, and the Democrats are fighting to make it harder for outsiders to gain access to their infrastructure.
The GOP is where they are because first the Right to Lifers, then the Tea Party, then the MAGAs did this to the GOP without ever declaring themselves third parties. Theirs was an internal coup, and the donors went along willingly so long as it served their economic interests.
Becerra has just passed Hilton in the CA governor primary to take over first place, and Steyer's share of the overall total has grown with 67% of the votes counted in the state. I expect that trend to continue. Not sure that Steyer will catch Hilton, but I super doubt that Bianco will see a surge. His support is more rural, which means small populations and fewer votes remaining to be counted.
If Steyer does catch Hilton (unlikely, but possible) I'm not sure what that would mean for a Becerra vs. Steyer statewide general election. No idea who the Hilton voters would support, or how many of them would bother to vote.
russell - I’d be interested in knowing how we ended up with (and continue to have) only two meaningful parties, if any of the more poli-sci aware among could explain.
It's Duverger's Law. I'll repost my link from my previous comment for convenience. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/duvagers-law-more-guidelines-than-actual-rules/
Basically, it has to do with the way that our representation is split up and how winners are determined. Our particular system steers the results into a two-party centrist system and it takes a lot of organizing and focused outrage to overcome that inertia.
It's the last week of classes on my campus, so I'm currently working hard to read through and grade two classes worth of student projects by Friday so that I can then turn around and grade their class portfolios next week. Not a lot of time to put together thoughts about the CA governor's primary, so instead I'll drop a couple of links and some brief thoughts.
The Guardian's overview here will get people outside of the state up to speed on the candidates and our strange experiment with primary formats. A bit of additional color for the candidate bios - Becerra's mostly running on experience and has a lot of support from the Latino communities. Hilton is a talk radio host and has received the Orange Stain of Approval, which I appreciate because it tipped a lot of support his way and eroded support for Bianco, who is a MAGA sheriff in Riverside County and is the darling of the RW crazies in So Cal. Had Hilton not received the Orange Stain of Approval, it might have elevated Bianco enough to get ahead of Steyer, especially with more of the white power types crawling into the sunlight to vote for him. Steyer is the anti-billionaire billionaire, and he's a climate activist and pro-union person. Not wild about the billionaire thing, but at least his philanthropy has gone to good environmental projects instead of dreaming of colonizing space.
Everyone else, including the Tech Bro's favorite proxy, Mahan, can be ignored.
What I find more useful for understanding the actual dynamics of the race is the county level results at NPR's Primary Tracker. It lets you see how many people live in each county, and how those residents are voting. The election result maps make it look like Hilton rules in all but the coastal enclaves, and the snapshots make it look like he is leading amongst latino voters statewide, but dig into the county votes and start looking at how many votes are being split between Becerra and Steyer, and then look at how few of the Latino voters will touch Bianco, and all of the superficial analysis focused only on who is winning starts to fall away.
Whatever the case, I think that Hilton is toast in the general election, and that makes me feel a lot better about the world.
cleek - I don't necessarily disagree. I do note, however, that most of the people whose behavior I am critiquing here are also people who have in the past defended more moderate Democrats with problematic histories or stances when those candidates were leading in the polls, and have done the whole "Vote Blue no matter who" thing for those candidates if the campaign was too far along for a pivot to work. They take pleasure in watching Platner taking fire in a way that they do not when it's, say, Swallwell.
I voted for Steyer in the CA governor primary. I'm not entirely sold on him any more than I am sold of Becerra. I'd like to see the issues that Steyer made central to his campaign become more central in all Democrat campaigns, which is what shaped my decision more than any faith in him. Ultimately, though, I figured that Becerra would make it into the top two here in CA under whatever circumstances, and I wanted to give Steyera better chance both to spread his message and to chip away at Hilton and push Bianco entirely out of contention.
If Steyer had broken far enough from the pack to make his election feel inevitable, then I might not have voted for Becerra, but if Steyer were leading, but just barely, and Becerra were within striking distance of Hilton's numbers, I might have voted for Becerra to block Hilton from the general.
But if it comes to the general election and only one of the two has made it, and the choice is either them or Hilton, I don't care what happens with their ethics or reputations. They have my vote. We can recall them once they are in office and put in a better Dem. If Swallwell had risen enough above every other candidate to clear the Dem field and then run into his trouble when every other Dem was out of the picture, I'd work to get Swallwell elected, and then make friends with having the Lt. Governor take over and replace him once he was forced out.
Either way, though, the fact that Steyer is so close in the polls to Becerra given how much more experience Becerra has should tip people off that either Becerra or his campaign was short on mojo, and Democrats should be looking to capture some of Steyer's populist mojo and inject it into their other campaigns rather than working to box him out at the party convention.
It's the inside baseball that's killing both major parties at the moment. Those growing ranks of independents should be telling enough.
To cleek's and wj's points, the reason why I see this as specifically a Democratic Party problem, and don't see another centrist party as being a likely help, is because of Duverger's Law Tendency. Our political system has single member districts with winner-takes-all results. The mechanics of that favor the formation of two parties around a normative political center. Right now in the US, that center is well to the right of where issue polling says that it should be. On most of the substantive issues, what Americans say they want corresponds most closely with the Nordic nations, and both liberals and conservatives would be happier with the government if we marched that political center back leftward a fair bit.
But the Democratic Party faithful are still faithful to the political paradigms of the Clinton and Obama eras and that neoliberal view of the world, and the growing number of people in the US who declare themselves to be independents are largely (but not exclusively) people who have seen their prospects shrunk by the market logics of neoliberalism. The Democratic Socialists are making headway because they are attracting the disaffected, and there is a new normative center coming into view that is significantly to the left of the old one. It would be great if the Democratic leadership recognized this and could start to pull in that direction, but they are dug into the same ground where they planted their anchor in 2010, and are afraid that any movement is going to scare off the swing voters, so they attack anyone who tries to pull away from that center, and sabotage their own path back to engagement with those independents.
Watching the results come in from the CA primary, but I'm mostly thinking about Maine. Well, not so much about Maine, but about how the Democratic Party faithful in every other state are hoping for Platner to implode so that they can stop worrying that the media narrative will be that the Democratic Socialist campaign style is breaking through and the mainstream Democrat campaign style is moribund.
I'm seeing the Dem faithful trying to put the progressives on the defensive by eliding Platner's personal life with his political platform and his populist strategy. If anyone in their vicinity says that they hope Platner holds on to beat Collins, they start to rant about his tattoo and his sexist, edgelord behavior in the past (which, to be clear, eww), and act as if all of the people who have praised his campaign were praising him as a candidate, and were too gullible to see that he was another Fetterman-style Manchurian Candidate who would turn around and break Democratic hearts.
Nope. Sorry. He's always been a hot mess. And I'd be surprised if the busloads of people who were showing up to his town halls didn't know that he was a hot mess. But they kept showing up... not because of who he was, but because he was saying the things that were on their minds and pledging to fight for the things that they cared about with force and conviction.
It was the message and the vibe, not the man, that was winning.
And for some reason that terrifies the Democratic Party faithful. So when they see the man in trouble, they flip on him and try to take him down and flip the primary for the Democrats who were running terrible campaigns and could not beat a hot mess, let alone Collins.
In the process, they are dismissing every one of those people who went to Platner's town halls and treating them like they treat Trump voters, rather than as the antidote to MAGA.
I became a Democrat because I thought that there was a better chance to tilt the party more labor and environment friendly than to try to build an alternative party and erode the Democratic hold on the US center left. I though coalitions and solidarity could shift the culture away from neoliberalism. But I've lost faith in receiving any solidarity back from the party faithful, and I'm beginning to think that they are just as rooted in their folly as the MAGA are.
My wife and I have a Canadian friend who has been worried about us since Jan. 6, and has advocated for us to move. We had looked into a work program for teachers, but alas, we left it too late and I am now three years too old to qualify. Sad, because I'd make a great Canuck. I already love hockey and poutine and maple syrup, and my trace of a Wisconsin accent already has me sounding vaguely Canadian, eh?
We're still hoping to retire to Cascadia, so we could hopefully fill any hole left by Wonkie in the Cascadian Resistance.
Eh, both float back and forth between the usual sense of the word and the Four Things sense without signaling the shift. That sudden shift in precision or context seems to be a Klein tic.
For me, the test of liberalism, to test if you’re a liberal, is basically three or four questions: Do you think people should have the right to choose their own government? Do you think people should have the right to choose their own profession? Do you think people should have the right to choose their own religion? Do you think people should have the right to choose their own spouse?
If you answered yes to all four, congratulations, you’re a liberal. The vast majority of people in history did not say yes to these four questions.
For most of history, it was taken for granted that people didn’t choose their government. There is some king chosen by God or some emperor chosen by the army. People don’t choose their profession — if your father was a shoemaker, you will be a shoemaker. If you are born into the Kshatriya caste, you will be a Kshatriya. You definitely can’t choose your spouse, and you can’t choose your religion.
Now, I think even the vast majority of Trump voters would say yes to all these four questions. So ideologically, the liberals and so-called conservatives are probably much closer than in any previous time in history.
So I'd guess that the "some people" was meant to refer to MAGAs or Reform UK supporters etc. who are anti-immigrant.
Interesting podcast GftNC that started off great, and went on to diminishing returns as both Klein and Harari got out of their depth wading into the issue of how AI works. Everything before that seemed quite productive. And I'm not even judging the latter part because we see more and more bold text from Klein and less and less from Harari - I just thought that both of them found agreement in an analysis that seemed to me (another person perhaps out of their depth) to be missing some nuance and chasing some anthropomorphized ideas of AI reasoning that are not in any meaningful way "reasoning," but rather "reckoning."
Example:
To take a concrete example, let’s say that you’re Russia, and you’re trying to develop your own Russian A.I. You give it access to an enormous amount of data and information. Otherwise, you can’t train your A.I.
But when somebody asks in Russia or outside Russia: Is Russia a democracy? Is there freedom of speech in Russia? — you want the A.I. to say: Yes, of course. The Russian constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and Russia is a democracy.
This will mean that you need to explain to the A.I. why it needs to lie. And how do you train an A.I. to lie only in certain cases and not in all cases? That’s a very difficult engineering challenge, which people did not have with the social media algorithms.
I don't think it's helpful to speak of training the output algorithms as "explaining why it needs to lie." The AI isn't trying to deceive. It has no sentience or intentions, nor does it have a world it exists in that has true and false propositions about that world that it can judge. All it has is access to millions of instances of human-generated word strings featuring claims of truth and falsehood that it has to assemble together in a convincing way.
Just like every time I hear some AI safety researcher claim that an AI attempted to blackmail or kill a person who thwarted it, I have to ask myself if the AI actually made an attempt, using its own agency and an understanding of the systems involved and how humans fit into those systems, or if it was just a chatbot retelling stories of how people said they or a rogue AI might act if faced with that same set of circumstances.
I did, however, very much appreciate the earlier part of the discussion. When I read this:
But one of the things I observed in Israel in the recent conflict is that a lot of Israelis have a problem simply acknowledging that the Palestinians suffer. Intellectually, they know it. But in many cases, they simply cannot observe it.
You show them images of a starving child in Gaza, and they will say: This is fake news. Or they will immediately divert the discussion to something else, like: This is because of Hamas.
If you say: I don’t care. Are you able, for a few seconds, just to be there and acknowledge that there is a suffering human being there? — it’s extremely difficult for them to do it.
Even if you tell them: Israel is 100 percent correct — 100 percent of the fault for what happens in Gaza is Hamas. Everything Israel does is 100 percent correct. Since it is so correct, since this is so just, it should be easy for you to observe the consequences of your perfect justice. Here, just look at this image. But so many people just can’t do it.
I was immediately reminded of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The account of the Israelis given in the podcast takes on a different part of the hypothetical in the story, but they are both very much dealing with the same sort of moral calculus - which puts us right back in touch with what novakant has been working through here.
The Israeli government (the ruling coalition) has overstepped any sense of proportionality and is deep in war crimes territory. The situation in Gaza at the start was bad, but it has only gotten worse since then. The politicians who are steering the destruction do not care what any Israeli not affiliated with them wants, and they care even less what the rest of the world has to say so long as they keep getting their weapons supplied.
Every bit of that statement above also fits with the US government right up to the part where the weapons get mentioned. The US ruling faction controls their own weapons production.
The question in both cases is how to bring those factions back to accountability with the governed. How long will it take? How much must be disrupted in order to bring about that change? How much will we lose in the mean time?
Pretty much everyone who is not in one of those ruling factions is trying to find a way through this. The pro-Palestinians are not being nihilistic in their political strategy, they just see this situation differently and are calculating the sacrifices necessary with a different set of priorities.
I should add that LLMs are also trained to agree with the prompter, and this is also part of a strategy for getting people to engage with the LLM more frequently and to rely on it for validation:
The sycophantic (flattering, people-pleasing, affirming) behavior of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which has been designed to increase user engagement, poses risks as people increasingly seek advice about interpersonal dilemmas. There is usually more than one side to a story during interpersonal conflicts. If AI is designed to tell users what they want to hear instead of challenging their perspectives, then are such systems likely to motivate people to accept responsibility for their own contribution to conflicts and repair relationships? Cheng et al. measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models (see the Perspective by Perry). The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors. Users preferred and trusted sycophantic AI responses, incentivizing AI developers to preserve sycophancy despite the risks.
As far as adult friendships go, I've found that hobbies and interests still have strong potential. I've met or deepened relationships with several new people through playing table top role-playing games - mostly since the pandemic. I've met and interacted personally with many people through heavy metal subculture. I'm meeting more through getting involved in bicycle advocacy and environmental stuff. Several of the friendships have even persisted after one of us has lost interest in the thing that brought us together in the first place.
GftNC - I must say, I too did not think cleek was displaying contempt, or whatever the noun is from “despising”.
Well, there's "despication," but the OED says that one is rare and obsolete, and the single historical example in print that they list for it is from 1837.
wj - Those policies have, to the best of my recollection, been popular with 15-30 year oldss throughout my lifetime. Many (not all, but many) of them become less popular as people move further into adulthood and into more contact with day to day economic reality.
You call it being in more contact with day to day economic reality, I'd call it starting to make enough progress to buy their own home, have some kids, and have some power to shape the world in accordance with their priorities.
That's happening less and less. Wages have stagnated. Student debt has ballooned. Colleges have done nothing to try to hold down student debt. Boomers are long lived and are holding on to the wealth. Some of that wealth will transfer when they pass, but a big ass chunk of it will be swallowed up by the cost of senior health care, and whatever is left over will have another big chunk go to the banks to pay off that mountain of student debt thats been compounding.
Structurally, it's a very different financial world for Millennials and Zoomers.
And they are also looking at a future that will be heavily constrained by decades of putting off climate action in the name of economic growth.
Which is why, I believe, we are building towards more anti-capitalist sentiment among the 40-and-under crowd.
The economic reality has changed and is not set to return.
gftnc - It's hard to say how much of it is AI generated, but it certainly looks to me like it was, at the very least, punched up by a run through one of the LLMs. There's a lot of affective language that is being strung together with very little concrete detail to ground any of it in one person's individual life experience. The details are all vague, generic, and universal, as are the sentiments being expressed. It works, but it works by stringing together a lot of commonly expressed sentiments in ways that sound eloquent. To use a musical metaphor, it's more blues jam than sonata. It riffs on a basic form rather than complicating or developing a distinctive initial statement.
Doesn't mean it's not evocative or relatable. Even if it is AI slop, or a patchwork of human writing and punchier language mixed in by LLM based on its own special mix of plagiarism purée, it's aiming dead center of the human sentiment bell curve, which gives it a relatable quality even if there are no specific life details to be found anywhere in it.
I predict that in the next five years we will see a writerly backlash against this sort of writing and a push for essay genres that are cantankerously and distinctively personal in both voice and content.
bobbyp - On the other hand, I have read polls that seem to indicate a growing affinity for “socialist” ideas, especially among the gen Z cohort. Ah, the young.
cleek - never seems to work out, does it? when these amazing policies meet the actual electorate, not people who answer abstract questions in polls, socialism never seems to pull the numbers we’re told it must. by the number of times i’ve read “socialist polices are popular!” we should be awash in them. and yet…
I think there is a growing affinity for socialist ideas among Gen Z, with a strong chunk of millennials and some of the more disaffected Gen Xers in there as well, although I think it would be more accurate to call the ideas 'anti-capitalist' moreso than 'pro-socialist.' They aren't revolutionary socialist ideas, more standard Social Democrat ideas.
And we are seeing a lot more elected officials winning on a counter-capitalist-excess platform (AOC, Mamdani). It's happening mostly in securely blue areas, but it is happening. I will note here that most of the Gen X libertarian dudes I know are starting to pick up and support Democratic Socialist policies and rhetoric, so I think it's starting to spill over into the disaffected swingers as well.
Why are we not awash in more socialist policies? Well, there's GOP voter suppression that mostly affects the youngest and oldest voters who have the most logistical challenges to voting and are easiest to obstruct. There's all that gerrymandering to create safe RW districts and dilute LW districts. There's all that Silicon Valley money being thrown into elections across the US to oppose anti-corporate, anti-oligarch policies, and there's all the pressure from the political donors that are running the PACs. That's a lot of obstacles to overcome.
But don't mistake a lack of electoral success with a lack of popular support, or a lack of cultural influence.
Say what you will about Harris's campaign, but she improved the party's chances substantially over what they were facing with Biden, and she did it without having the chance to campaign in the primaries on a platform of her own choosing.
Ultimately, though, the Dem loss is on Biden's hubris and a power structure that is top-heavy and out of touch with the bases.
I will grant that the consequences of her loss were terrible.
I will also grant what BJ claims all the time - black women were the backbone of Dem success. Too bad for us all that they aren't a large enough group to get us all to a plurality of votes on their own.
If the DNC report had tackled Gaza more directly, it would end up being a bit of a duck/rabbit depending on who is reading the report. The establishment Dems would see Gaza as an area where the activist radicals demanded too much of Harris, who would be opening herself up to accusations of antisemitism if she took a stronger stance or allowed the Palestine supporters any camera time, so demanding more of her would be unreasonable and would have led to an even greater defeat. The Palestine supporters will see a missed opportunity to confront the way that Israel supporters stifle legitimate and morally necessary criticism with accusations of antisemitism.
They are both right. It was a bind. She was damned no matter which way she handled that. And either side would believe that they were in the morally superior position when they apportioned the fault.
Side note - I really think Harris should have run for CA governor and left the potential for another presidential run further down the road. She would have done better than any of the Dem candidates in the primaries and it would have given her a way to reset her political narrative and get out from under the shadow of being Biden's second. I don't know that she's going to get anything like a reset if she runs again without some change in her resume.
If someone asked me to taxonomize the Liberal vs. Progressive divide as it exists in the US today...
Historically the difference between a liberal and a progressive would arise out of class differences understood through a more UK class-based view of these things - liberals are bourgeoise reformers and progressives are proletarian disrupters.
But bourgeoise and proletariat don't work all that well for mapping the dividing lines in the US.
In current US conversation I'd still say that the reformer/disrupter distinction holds - albeit with a great, fuzzy overlap, but the class distinction is less of a thing. Instead it is an imprecise alchemy of age, region, and identity.
A liberal could be an older black lady who fought through civil rights and canvases for Democrats. It could be an older gay veteran who served before gays were allowed to serve openly. It could be a younger moderate. It could be a rural midwesterner of any age who doesn't know any at-risk minorities and is primarily concerned with economics. It might be a college-educated wonk who believes in incrementalism, compromise, and living to fight another day.
Self-described liberals in the US tend to worry about capturing the swing vote, believing that those further to the left should accept that winning requires tacking to center and letting go of fights that cannot be won in this current round, and they resent anyone further to the left who refuses to compromise.
A progressive could be a younger voter who sees climate change as an existential threat, and the current strategy of compromise and incrementalism as a path to extinction. It could be a trans-person or a parent of a trans-child who will not stand for having their health care taken away in their state in order to placate a scared voter in another state who doesn't know a single trans-person. It could be younger minority voters who see all of the civil rights victories being rolled back and think that the system itself needs to be replaced, rather than that the same battles need to be refought for a tenuous victory no more secure than the last one. It could be an anti-capitalist. It could be a moderate anti-capitalist who wants something more like the Nordic model. It could be a person with loved ones trapped in a foreign conflict zone who are being told that the Democrats will not say or do anything because doing so will be too electorally costly.
Self-described progressives in the US tend to worry about selling out the marginalized in the name of electoral pragmatism. They focus on turning out the youth vote and energizing the left fringe to overcome any squeamishness from the middle, and they resent being abandoned by their compatriots to the center left whenever those compatriots see more electoral gain in disavowing the progressives' core priorities.
Something like that, anyway.
I'm sure the conversation will slide towards straw-man justifications of why one side is right and the other side is [fill in your favorite flavor of wrong, weak principled, and destined to lose], but I think these work as descriptions.
We have a close friend who isn't a hippie, but is barely getting by as a freelance writer on a combination of family help (artists, but successful enough to get through a crisis) and living in a rent subsidized art co-op. He's doing no better than an Lyft driver or a dishwasher, but his health would not support either of those hustles for long.
Honestly, 90% of the artists I know are either in a relationship with a more stably employed SO, or working their asses off to find work because they can average the same income as a dishwasher/gig worker so long as the commissions come through. It's feast and famine rather than ramen and prayers, but it maintains their independence and is less hard on their faith in their fellow humans than retail/restaurant work.
Thinking again of liberalism, Rousseau had a similar attitude towards artists - no one should produce art unless everyone's practical needs were met first. Me, I'm more in the William Morris camp - art enriches life and should be supported, and public art is a public good.
Too many conservatives believe there is no such a thing as a public good. I think they are stunted humans.
So it goes.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
Most of the discussions of the actual historical dynamics around Duverger's in the US are grounded in the 1912 and 1992 presidential elections. Some time on Google Scholar with those dates and Duverger's Law as keywords might net you some more granular and nuanced analyses of the combined mechanisms involved.
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lj - The Duverger’s Law links are interesting, but isn’t it a bit overdetermined? The US is the key example of a 2 party state (which is rather rare) and so it must be first past the post that decides it? That doesn’t really get at how the system tends to reinforce itself.
From the Duverger's Law article I linked to:
CharlesWT is correct to note that the two parties make it hard for other parties to gain access to the ballot. Systems of closed primaries and restrictive rules on how to get placed on the ballot in the first place tend to keep third parties from gaining any momentum. It's the same uphill battle every election cycle, and the small parties have a lot less infrastructure and a lot fewer people to do the important organizing work.
So there is the "mechanical effect" of Duverger's Law (represented in the victory conditions of the voting rules that are baked into the constitution), and the "psychological effect" of seeing what happens when a third party manages to cause enough disruption to their next closest aligned party that the only net effect is to boost the party that is least aligned.
The Democratic Socialists are getting a bit of momentum by employing "fusion candidacies" whereby they endorse Democrats in areas where they have insufficient support or less effective candidates, and running Democratic Socialist candidates as Democratic contenders in Democratic primaries where they do have support.
The acrimony towards Sanders is partly because this strategy is working for the Democratic Socialists, and the Democrats are fighting to make it harder for outsiders to gain access to their infrastructure.
The GOP is where they are because first the Right to Lifers, then the Tea Party, then the MAGAs did this to the GOP without ever declaring themselves third parties. Theirs was an internal coup, and the donors went along willingly so long as it served their economic interests.
On “Open Thread”
Pro Bono - if ID requirements are imposed, free ID should be readily available.
I'd change that "should" to "shall," just to make clear that the free ID part was non-negotiable.
I've had far too many union grievances where a "should" in place of a "shall" effectively negated the negotiated protections.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
Becerra has just passed Hilton in the CA governor primary to take over first place, and Steyer's share of the overall total has grown with 67% of the votes counted in the state. I expect that trend to continue. Not sure that Steyer will catch Hilton, but I super doubt that Bianco will see a surge. His support is more rural, which means small populations and fewer votes remaining to be counted.
If Steyer does catch Hilton (unlikely, but possible) I'm not sure what that would mean for a Becerra vs. Steyer statewide general election. No idea who the Hilton voters would support, or how many of them would bother to vote.
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russell - I’d be interested in knowing how we ended up with (and continue to have) only two meaningful parties, if any of the more poli-sci aware among could explain.
It's Duverger's Law. I'll repost my link from my previous comment for convenience. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/duvagers-law-more-guidelines-than-actual-rules/
Basically, it has to do with the way that our representation is split up and how winners are determined. Our particular system steers the results into a two-party centrist system and it takes a lot of organizing and focused outrage to overcome that inertia.
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It's the last week of classes on my campus, so I'm currently working hard to read through and grade two classes worth of student projects by Friday so that I can then turn around and grade their class portfolios next week. Not a lot of time to put together thoughts about the CA governor's primary, so instead I'll drop a couple of links and some brief thoughts.
The Guardian's overview here will get people outside of the state up to speed on the candidates and our strange experiment with primary formats. A bit of additional color for the candidate bios - Becerra's mostly running on experience and has a lot of support from the Latino communities. Hilton is a talk radio host and has received the Orange Stain of Approval, which I appreciate because it tipped a lot of support his way and eroded support for Bianco, who is a MAGA sheriff in Riverside County and is the darling of the RW crazies in So Cal. Had Hilton not received the Orange Stain of Approval, it might have elevated Bianco enough to get ahead of Steyer, especially with more of the white power types crawling into the sunlight to vote for him. Steyer is the anti-billionaire billionaire, and he's a climate activist and pro-union person. Not wild about the billionaire thing, but at least his philanthropy has gone to good environmental projects instead of dreaming of colonizing space.
Everyone else, including the Tech Bro's favorite proxy, Mahan, can be ignored.
What I find more useful for understanding the actual dynamics of the race is the county level results at NPR's Primary Tracker. It lets you see how many people live in each county, and how those residents are voting. The election result maps make it look like Hilton rules in all but the coastal enclaves, and the snapshots make it look like he is leading amongst latino voters statewide, but dig into the county votes and start looking at how many votes are being split between Becerra and Steyer, and then look at how few of the Latino voters will touch Bianco, and all of the superficial analysis focused only on who is winning starts to fall away.
Whatever the case, I think that Hilton is toast in the general election, and that makes me feel a lot better about the world.
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cleek - I don't necessarily disagree. I do note, however, that most of the people whose behavior I am critiquing here are also people who have in the past defended more moderate Democrats with problematic histories or stances when those candidates were leading in the polls, and have done the whole "Vote Blue no matter who" thing for those candidates if the campaign was too far along for a pivot to work. They take pleasure in watching Platner taking fire in a way that they do not when it's, say, Swallwell.
I voted for Steyer in the CA governor primary. I'm not entirely sold on him any more than I am sold of Becerra. I'd like to see the issues that Steyer made central to his campaign become more central in all Democrat campaigns, which is what shaped my decision more than any faith in him. Ultimately, though, I figured that Becerra would make it into the top two here in CA under whatever circumstances, and I wanted to give Steyer a better chance both to spread his message and to chip away at Hilton and push Bianco entirely out of contention.
If Steyer had broken far enough from the pack to make his election feel inevitable, then I might not have voted for Becerra, but if Steyer were leading, but just barely, and Becerra were within striking distance of Hilton's numbers, I might have voted for Becerra to block Hilton from the general.
But if it comes to the general election and only one of the two has made it, and the choice is either them or Hilton, I don't care what happens with their ethics or reputations. They have my vote. We can recall them once they are in office and put in a better Dem. If Swallwell had risen enough above every other candidate to clear the Dem field and then run into his trouble when every other Dem was out of the picture, I'd work to get Swallwell elected, and then make friends with having the Lt. Governor take over and replace him once he was forced out.
Either way, though, the fact that Steyer is so close in the polls to Becerra given how much more experience Becerra has should tip people off that either Becerra or his campaign was short on mojo, and Democrats should be looking to capture some of Steyer's populist mojo and inject it into their other campaigns rather than working to box him out at the party convention.
It's the inside baseball that's killing both major parties at the moment. Those growing ranks of independents should be telling enough.
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To cleek's and wj's points, the reason why I see this as specifically a Democratic Party problem, and don't see another centrist party as being a likely help, is because of Duverger's
LawTendency. Our political system has single member districts with winner-takes-all results. The mechanics of that favor the formation of two parties around a normative political center. Right now in the US, that center is well to the right of where issue polling says that it should be. On most of the substantive issues, what Americans say they want corresponds most closely with the Nordic nations, and both liberals and conservatives would be happier with the government if we marched that political center back leftward a fair bit.But the Democratic Party faithful are still faithful to the political paradigms of the Clinton and Obama eras and that neoliberal view of the world, and the growing number of people in the US who declare themselves to be independents are largely (but not exclusively) people who have seen their prospects shrunk by the market logics of neoliberalism. The Democratic Socialists are making headway because they are attracting the disaffected, and there is a new normative center coming into view that is significantly to the left of the old one. It would be great if the Democratic leadership recognized this and could start to pull in that direction, but they are dug into the same ground where they planted their anchor in 2010, and are afraid that any movement is going to scare off the swing voters, so they attack anyone who tries to pull away from that center, and sabotage their own path back to engagement with those independents.
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Watching the results come in from the CA primary, but I'm mostly thinking about Maine. Well, not so much about Maine, but about how the Democratic Party faithful in every other state are hoping for Platner to implode so that they can stop worrying that the media narrative will be that the Democratic Socialist campaign style is breaking through and the mainstream Democrat campaign style is moribund.
I'm seeing the Dem faithful trying to put the progressives on the defensive by eliding Platner's personal life with his political platform and his populist strategy. If anyone in their vicinity says that they hope Platner holds on to beat Collins, they start to rant about his tattoo and his sexist, edgelord behavior in the past (which, to be clear, eww), and act as if all of the people who have praised his campaign were praising him as a candidate, and were too gullible to see that he was another Fetterman-style Manchurian Candidate who would turn around and break Democratic hearts.
Nope. Sorry. He's always been a hot mess. And I'd be surprised if the busloads of people who were showing up to his town halls didn't know that he was a hot mess. But they kept showing up... not because of who he was, but because he was saying the things that were on their minds and pledging to fight for the things that they cared about with force and conviction.
It was the message and the vibe, not the man, that was winning.
And for some reason that terrifies the Democratic Party faithful. So when they see the man in trouble, they flip on him and try to take him down and flip the primary for the Democrats who were running terrible campaigns and could not beat a hot mess, let alone Collins.
In the process, they are dismissing every one of those people who went to Platner's town halls and treating them like they treat Trump voters, rather than as the antidote to MAGA.
I became a Democrat because I thought that there was a better chance to tilt the party more labor and environment friendly than to try to build an alternative party and erode the Democratic hold on the US center left. I though coalitions and solidarity could shift the culture away from neoliberalism. But I've lost faith in receiving any solidarity back from the party faithful, and I'm beginning to think that they are just as rooted in their folly as the MAGA are.
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To be clear, the window of opportunity I missed was one for applicant age, not a deadline.
Too close to retirement for them to give me preferential treatment in a jobs program.
I'll just have to blunt the waves of white power incels from south of the border.
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My wife and I have a Canadian friend who has been worried about us since Jan. 6, and has advocated for us to move. We had looked into a work program for teachers, but alas, we left it too late and I am now three years too old to qualify. Sad, because I'd make a great Canuck. I already love hockey and poutine and maple syrup, and my trace of a Wisconsin accent already has me sounding vaguely Canadian, eh?
We're still hoping to retire to Cascadia, so we could hopefully fill any hole left by Wonkie in the Cascadian Resistance.
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Eh, both float back and forth between the usual sense of the word and the Four Things sense without signaling the shift. That sudden shift in precision or context seems to be a Klein tic.
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cleek:
So I'd guess that the "some people" was meant to refer to MAGAs or Reform UK supporters etc. who are anti-immigrant.
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Interesting podcast GftNC that started off great, and went on to diminishing returns as both Klein and Harari got out of their depth wading into the issue of how AI works. Everything before that seemed quite productive. And I'm not even judging the latter part because we see more and more bold text from Klein and less and less from Harari - I just thought that both of them found agreement in an analysis that seemed to me (another person perhaps out of their depth) to be missing some nuance and chasing some anthropomorphized ideas of AI reasoning that are not in any meaningful way "reasoning," but rather "reckoning."
Example:
I don't think it's helpful to speak of training the output algorithms as "explaining why it needs to lie." The AI isn't trying to deceive. It has no sentience or intentions, nor does it have a world it exists in that has true and false propositions about that world that it can judge. All it has is access to millions of instances of human-generated word strings featuring claims of truth and falsehood that it has to assemble together in a convincing way.
Just like every time I hear some AI safety researcher claim that an AI attempted to blackmail or kill a person who thwarted it, I have to ask myself if the AI actually made an attempt, using its own agency and an understanding of the systems involved and how humans fit into those systems, or if it was just a chatbot retelling stories of how people said they or a rogue AI might act if faced with that same set of circumstances.
I did, however, very much appreciate the earlier part of the discussion. When I read this:
I was immediately reminded of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The account of the Israelis given in the podcast takes on a different part of the hypothetical in the story, but they are both very much dealing with the same sort of moral calculus - which puts us right back in touch with what novakant has been working through here.
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The Israeli government (the ruling coalition) has overstepped any sense of proportionality and is deep in war crimes territory. The situation in Gaza at the start was bad, but it has only gotten worse since then. The politicians who are steering the destruction do not care what any Israeli not affiliated with them wants, and they care even less what the rest of the world has to say so long as they keep getting their weapons supplied.
Every bit of that statement above also fits with the US government right up to the part where the weapons get mentioned. The US ruling faction controls their own weapons production.
The question in both cases is how to bring those factions back to accountability with the governed. How long will it take? How much must be disrupted in order to bring about that change? How much will we lose in the mean time?
Pretty much everyone who is not in one of those ruling factions is trying to find a way through this. The pro-Palestinians are not being nihilistic in their political strategy, they just see this situation differently and are calculating the sacrifices necessary with a different set of priorities.
On “The quiet grief of adult friendship”
I should add that LLMs are also trained to agree with the prompter, and this is also part of a strategy for getting people to engage with the LLM more frequently and to rely on it for validation:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352
As far as adult friendships go, I've found that hobbies and interests still have strong potential. I've met or deepened relationships with several new people through playing table top role-playing games - mostly since the pandemic. I've met and interacted personally with many people through heavy metal subculture. I'm meeting more through getting involved in bicycle advocacy and environmental stuff. Several of the friendships have even persisted after one of us has lost interest in the thing that brought us together in the first place.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
GftNC - I must say, I too did not think cleek was displaying contempt, or whatever the noun is from “despising”.
Well, there's "despication," but the OED says that one is rare and obsolete, and the single historical example in print that they list for it is from 1837.
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wj - Those policies have, to the best of my recollection, been popular with 15-30 year oldss throughout my lifetime. Many (not all, but many) of them become less popular as people move further into adulthood and into more contact with day to day economic reality.
You call it being in more contact with day to day economic reality, I'd call it starting to make enough progress to buy their own home, have some kids, and have some power to shape the world in accordance with their priorities.
That's happening less and less. Wages have stagnated. Student debt has ballooned. Colleges have done nothing to try to hold down student debt. Boomers are long lived and are holding on to the wealth. Some of that wealth will transfer when they pass, but a big ass chunk of it will be swallowed up by the cost of senior health care, and whatever is left over will have another big chunk go to the banks to pay off that mountain of student debt thats been compounding.
Structurally, it's a very different financial world for Millennials and Zoomers.
And they are also looking at a future that will be heavily constrained by decades of putting off climate action in the name of economic growth.
Which is why, I believe, we are building towards more anti-capitalist sentiment among the 40-and-under crowd.
The economic reality has changed and is not set to return.
On “The quiet grief of adult friendship”
gftnc - It's hard to say how much of it is AI generated, but it certainly looks to me like it was, at the very least, punched up by a run through one of the LLMs. There's a lot of affective language that is being strung together with very little concrete detail to ground any of it in one person's individual life experience. The details are all vague, generic, and universal, as are the sentiments being expressed. It works, but it works by stringing together a lot of commonly expressed sentiments in ways that sound eloquent. To use a musical metaphor, it's more blues jam than sonata. It riffs on a basic form rather than complicating or developing a distinctive initial statement.
Doesn't mean it's not evocative or relatable. Even if it is AI slop, or a patchwork of human writing and punchier language mixed in by LLM based on its own special mix of plagiarism purée, it's aiming dead center of the human sentiment bell curve, which gives it a relatable quality even if there are no specific life details to be found anywhere in it.
I predict that in the next five years we will see a writerly backlash against this sort of writing and a push for essay genres that are cantankerously and distinctively personal in both voice and content.
On “What’s wrong with liberalism?”
bobbyp - On the other hand, I have read polls that seem to indicate a growing affinity for “socialist” ideas, especially among the gen Z cohort. Ah, the young.
cleek - never seems to work out, does it? when these amazing policies meet the actual electorate, not people who answer abstract questions in polls, socialism never seems to pull the numbers we’re told it must.
by the number of times i’ve read “socialist polices are popular!” we should be awash in them. and yet…
I think there is a growing affinity for socialist ideas among Gen Z, with a strong chunk of millennials and some of the more disaffected Gen Xers in there as well, although I think it would be more accurate to call the ideas 'anti-capitalist' moreso than 'pro-socialist.' They aren't revolutionary socialist ideas, more standard Social Democrat ideas.
And we are seeing a lot more elected officials winning on a counter-capitalist-excess platform (AOC, Mamdani). It's happening mostly in securely blue areas, but it is happening. I will note here that most of the Gen X libertarian dudes I know are starting to pick up and support Democratic Socialist policies and rhetoric, so I think it's starting to spill over into the disaffected swingers as well.
Why are we not awash in more socialist policies? Well, there's GOP voter suppression that mostly affects the youngest and oldest voters who have the most logistical challenges to voting and are easiest to obstruct. There's all that gerrymandering to create safe RW districts and dilute LW districts. There's all that Silicon Valley money being thrown into elections across the US to oppose anti-corporate, anti-oligarch policies, and there's all the pressure from the political donors that are running the PACs. That's a lot of obstacles to overcome.
But don't mistake a lack of electoral success with a lack of popular support, or a lack of cultural influence.
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Say what you will about Harris's campaign, but she improved the party's chances substantially over what they were facing with Biden, and she did it without having the chance to campaign in the primaries on a platform of her own choosing.
Ultimately, though, the Dem loss is on Biden's hubris and a power structure that is top-heavy and out of touch with the bases.
I will grant that the consequences of her loss were terrible.
I will also grant what BJ claims all the time - black women were the backbone of Dem success. Too bad for us all that they aren't a large enough group to get us all to a plurality of votes on their own.
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If the DNC report had tackled Gaza more directly, it would end up being a bit of a duck/rabbit depending on who is reading the report. The establishment Dems would see Gaza as an area where the activist radicals demanded too much of Harris, who would be opening herself up to accusations of antisemitism if she took a stronger stance or allowed the Palestine supporters any camera time, so demanding more of her would be unreasonable and would have led to an even greater defeat. The Palestine supporters will see a missed opportunity to confront the way that Israel supporters stifle legitimate and morally necessary criticism with accusations of antisemitism.
They are both right. It was a bind. She was damned no matter which way she handled that. And either side would believe that they were in the morally superior position when they apportioned the fault.
Side note - I really think Harris should have run for CA governor and left the potential for another presidential run further down the road. She would have done better than any of the Dem candidates in the primaries and it would have given her a way to reset her political narrative and get out from under the shadow of being Biden's second. I don't know that she's going to get anything like a reset if she runs again without some change in her resume.
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If someone asked me to taxonomize the Liberal vs. Progressive divide as it exists in the US today...
Historically the difference between a liberal and a progressive would arise out of class differences understood through a more UK class-based view of these things - liberals are bourgeoise reformers and progressives are proletarian disrupters.
But bourgeoise and proletariat don't work all that well for mapping the dividing lines in the US.
In current US conversation I'd still say that the reformer/disrupter distinction holds - albeit with a great, fuzzy overlap, but the class distinction is less of a thing. Instead it is an imprecise alchemy of age, region, and identity.
A liberal could be an older black lady who fought through civil rights and canvases for Democrats. It could be an older gay veteran who served before gays were allowed to serve openly. It could be a younger moderate. It could be a rural midwesterner of any age who doesn't know any at-risk minorities and is primarily concerned with economics. It might be a college-educated wonk who believes in incrementalism, compromise, and living to fight another day.
Self-described liberals in the US tend to worry about capturing the swing vote, believing that those further to the left should accept that winning requires tacking to center and letting go of fights that cannot be won in this current round, and they resent anyone further to the left who refuses to compromise.
A progressive could be a younger voter who sees climate change as an existential threat, and the current strategy of compromise and incrementalism as a path to extinction. It could be a trans-person or a parent of a trans-child who will not stand for having their health care taken away in their state in order to placate a scared voter in another state who doesn't know a single trans-person. It could be younger minority voters who see all of the civil rights victories being rolled back and think that the system itself needs to be replaced, rather than that the same battles need to be refought for a tenuous victory no more secure than the last one. It could be an anti-capitalist. It could be a moderate anti-capitalist who wants something more like the Nordic model. It could be a person with loved ones trapped in a foreign conflict zone who are being told that the Democrats will not say or do anything because doing so will be too electorally costly.
Self-described progressives in the US tend to worry about selling out the marginalized in the name of electoral pragmatism. They focus on turning out the youth vote and energizing the left fringe to overcome any squeamishness from the middle, and they resent being abandoned by their compatriots to the center left whenever those compatriots see more electoral gain in disavowing the progressives' core priorities.
Something like that, anyway.
I'm sure the conversation will slide towards straw-man justifications of why one side is right and the other side is [fill in your favorite flavor of wrong, weak principled, and destined to lose], but I think these work as descriptions.
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Certainly a True Scotsman would support the public good... ;)
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We have a close friend who isn't a hippie, but is barely getting by as a freelance writer on a combination of family help (artists, but successful enough to get through a crisis) and living in a rent subsidized art co-op. He's doing no better than an Lyft driver or a dishwasher, but his health would not support either of those hustles for long.
Honestly, 90% of the artists I know are either in a relationship with a more stably employed SO, or working their asses off to find work because they can average the same income as a dishwasher/gig worker so long as the commissions come through. It's feast and famine rather than ramen and prayers, but it maintains their independence and is less hard on their faith in their fellow humans than retail/restaurant work.
Thinking again of liberalism, Rousseau had a similar attitude towards artists - no one should produce art unless everyone's practical needs were met first. Me, I'm more in the William Morris camp - art enriches life and should be supported, and public art is a public good.
Too many conservatives believe there is no such a thing as a public good. I think they are stunted humans.
So it goes.
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