The Two-Party Swindle

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mg/the_twoparty_swindle/

by splat • 17 years ago

77 71 17 years ago

This was better than I expected. Everyone here is already aware of the two-party swindle (I hope), but the author describes it in a fresh way. He also explains some of the reasons it happens, for people who know the swindle exists but don't understand why.

Also, he rather subtly points out that we haven't actually dispatched of the idea of people being ruled by a separate class, contrary to what we're taught in school.

tome2• 17 years ago

Even calling it a "swindle" is an example of this phenomenon. Why does it necessarily have to be "the political elite"/"the ruling class" versus "the disenfranchised populous"?

I'm sure a huge number of politicians are very frustrated by many of the policies of their party and would like to diverge from them to a greater or lesser extent. They are constrained too.

Why can we not see this as an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, with little overall direction?

scott_s• 17 years ago

That is how he presents it.

There doesn't have to be a conscious, collaborative effort by Your Politicians and Their Politicians to keep the Voters screaming at each other, so that they don't notice the increasing gap between the Voters and the Politicians. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It emerges from the interests of the individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them.

He calls it a "swindle" because whatever reservations politicians have with their party, they all try to get you to identify with themselves.

swombat• 17 years ago

Excellent article, as expected for an Eliezer Yudkowsky article.

One place where it leaves me hungry... what can we do about this very real problem? I understand that no single person can fix this all by themselves, but is there some kind of action that we can take, when the circumstances arise, that will help resolve this problem rather than help perpetuate it?

Edit: Additional note... this is one of the many reasons I like the Swiss system. We vote on issues separately from voting on people. This has its disadvantages, but at least it's direct democracy.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

Historically speaking, the corruption and degradation of the system build up until the empire collapses on itself or is defeated in a war and has a foreign power rebuild their government. This has been written about a bunch, the earliest known piece I've read notes of was by Ibn Khaldun. Some of his work is outdated, being 800 years old, but there's some pretty incredibly insightful things in it. Worth a skim:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

This view of historiography goes back about two millenia years in China. A corrupt regime loses the "mandate of Heaven" and a new regime takes its place by conquest.

bokonist10• 17 years ago

Direct democracy does not solve the problem, see California. The Swiss cantons work well because they are small. Direct democracy does not scale.

One of the best ideas for reform I've heard is the idea of unpredictable elections, a la Venice. See: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...

tome2• 17 years ago

Unpredictable elections look interesting but why do you support them? Is there any evidence that they perform well in any particular fashion?

yummyfajitas• 17 years ago

California is not quite a direct democracy. They have ballot propositions, yes, but they also have a legislature almost as bad as the NY legislature, and their state workers are completely unaccountable.

Arnold: Until the budget is sorted out, all state workers get minimum wage.

State workers: You can't do that. Besides, our computer are too old to handle paying minimum wage.

http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1132588.htm...

Musashi• 17 years ago

Party Politics and Partisanship are evil. Less interested in what is good for the country and more interested in what will get them elected to POWER!

DanielBMarkham15• 17 years ago

It's not just party politics though. It's the predilection of people to form up into groups and to identify with those groups even at the expense of logic and reason. Party politics is just what you get when you do it at a national level. It happens all the time all around you.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

At one point, I started making a list of all the decisions politicians could make and change about the way governments were run. I came up with over 100 items, very quickly. The Democrats and Republicans both didn't address and were in implicit agreement on some 95 of those 100 things, despite the fact that some of them are really ugly. For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC, and estimates have placed the worth of those rights over a billion dollars per year.

This made me sad.

barry-cotter• 17 years ago

Blog it. Then submit it.

davidw• 17 years ago

To reddit...

cousin_it3• 17 years ago

For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC

Source please. I don't believe you.

jellicle• 17 years ago

> For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC, and estimates have placed the worth of those rights over a billion dollars per year.

The "old" (VHF and UHF) broadcast frequencies were given to the various stations without any fees whatsoever, I believe. Each broadcast station has to pay a $170 (sic) license renewal fee every couple of years. Those frequency allocations are going away, being reclaimed by the government in the digital TV transition. Some of the old TV frequencies have already been auctioned:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_MHz_wireless_spectrum_aucti...

Many of the digital TV frequencies (which are in the same area as the old VHF and lower UHF frequencies) have been given to the existing TV stations free of charge. These would have been worth a great deal of money if sold or leased, as you can see from the 700MHz auction above.

So it's actually somewhat worse than the original poster says, in that there's no $100,000 collected.

cousin_it3• 17 years ago

Look, I'm really sorry for being such a boring no-fun dude, but... please source this statement.

DanielBMarkham15• 17 years ago

This is good -- Eliezer? How come it took so long for this to get on the board? Great article.

I thought this at first was a politics article, but for me, at least, it's a much more practical one. Let me explain.

Working with large corporations, I've found that this is not restricted to sports or politics. It happens between divisions, between business groups -- even between cliques of programmers on the same team. Politics is the ultimate generalization of the problem, but it's a much more practical and immediate matter.

I guess that's why I've never understood the fear of talking about politics on HN. Heck -- you guys do it all the time. Every time there's an Apple vs. Microsoft thread, or a Twitter vs. Blogging thread, or a functional programming vs. imperative programming thread -- this is the same thing. It's amazing people can't see it. You identify with a product, a brand, a group of people, and then suddenly it's us versus them. We have our experts, our slogans, our information sources. They have theirs. We can argue for years and never do more than talking past each other, because we've never generalized the type of discussion we are having and worked at the meta level.

Where I think politics is more interesting is that positions change month by month. That means that political party X may support something this month and be against it the next month. In effect, it's a critical thinking test -- can you identify your own bias? Because if you were arguing for something last month and are arguing against the same thing this month, you might be identifying more with a group that ideas. It's much easier to spot this when the positions keep changing, which makes a discussion of politics useful for detecting personal bias.

BTW, it's also a quick test for thinking about other things too. If you're meeting with a new person and they seem stuck on some political party thing, you can bet they're going to be group-identifying with a lot of other things as well. Different people have different levels of the need-to-identify. We all know the worst ones: the people with bumper stickers all over their car, various flag pins or whatever on their clothes, a rabid sports fan and a sticking-to-a-political-party-no-matter-what attitude.

Solutions to the two-party swindle? Term limits (to prevent camping out in office) Expiration limits for laws (to prevent get-what-you-can-now-attitude). Some sort of push for a multi-party system.

Oddly enough, in the US at least the thought was that it would end up being a dynamic system with small groups taking various positions and coalitions changing over time. Instead that's not how it worked out.

Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about tough topics with each other.

nazgulnarsil2• 17 years ago

something PG was grasping at when he spoke of keeping your identity small. we make ego boundary errors and this in turn leads to these larger errors.

HalcyonMuse• 17 years ago

Interesting tie-in, but I don't know what you're referencing. Source?

ggchappell• 17 years ago

Ah, a thought-provoking comment.

> Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about tough topics with each other.

A fine idea. It gets tricky, however, because there is a difference between an individual learning and a group learning.

Say you and I learn to have a reasonable discussion. That's great, as long as we are alone in a room together. But put us in a crowd with an open mic, and even if 99% of the crowd are mostly reasonable people, the remaining 1% can still wreck the discussion. Especially because there is maybe another 5% that can easily get their emotions aroused by the loony 1%. That, I think, is why there is a fear of political discussion on HN.

Then, of course, there is the question of what to do about it. HN has made a start; it's clearly one of the calmer places to have a public discussion on the net. However, I rather doubt that opening up HN to political discussion would work well. Sad ....

DanielBMarkham15• 17 years ago

Call me a believer in technology. I think this is a technical problem and not an insurmountable one.

I also think it's the most important social problem facing technologists today: how to dynamically and vigorously mix ideas on the internet without chaos.

Confusion• 17 years ago

It's amazing people can't see it.

Even when you see it, you still have to pay close attention not to fall into the trap. If you are arguing against a certain position, people tend to regard you as holding the opposite position and brandish you as 'on of them'. When you identify somewhat more with 'them', it is easy to forget you were holding middle ground and let yourself be pushed into that corner, causing you to actually take up a more extremist position than you were defending in the first place. Even after discovering the power this effect, it took me years to be constantly aware of it and resist it.

DanielBMarkham15• 17 years ago

The problem is worse than that: I've become convinced that everybody does this to one degree or another. In other words, we're all in the trap. It's not like you have the ability to somehow "snap yourself out of it" or something. When cornered, most of us just rationalize. [Insert long discussion on the limits of predicate logic when applied to anything involving human language here]

There are those in denial, sure. But based on my observations of myself and hundreds of others and dozens of groups (and a bit of reading about sales and social dynamics) it's just part of human nature. This is why good teams are so much stronger than the sum of their parts: since each person has a different cognitive blind spot, team members can look out for each other.

Eliezer• 17 years ago

A basic but essential point. You want to post about this to Less Wrong? (I can bless the account if you don't have enough karma.)

ckinnan• 17 years ago

Ironically, the Founders didn't expect a role for political parties and most were concerned with their rise.

"There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the Spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true--and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose--and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming, it should consume."

GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address to the people of the United States, Sep. 17, 1796

sethg• 17 years ago

The author seems to blame the two-party system and the class divide between politicians and voters for the fact that nobody is shrinking the size of the government.

I have a much simpler explanation for this phenomenon: no substantial body of voters want smaller government.

The clique of libertarians who actually believe in "smaller government" and not simply "government taking less of my money in taxes and spending less on the things that I personally don't like" is substantial on the Web and among the intelligentsia, but not so much in the voting booth. Look at how poorly Ron Paul did in the Republican primaries.

dinkumthinkum4• 17 years ago

I agree essentially with you but I don't think that's really why Ron Paul did so poorly. Ron Paul did poorly because he was always going to do poorly. He was kind of an older looking guy who said a lot of funny things and was kind of a curmudgeon.

Most people don't even know what libertarianism is or that he was one. Then many people who know he was a member of the Libertarian party don't really know the difference between those people and your garden variety Republican.

But you are right in that the majority of Americans aren't libertarians anyway. Most people (Republican, Democrat, "Independent," haha, whatever) actually do want the government to tell us what we can and can't put in our own bodies. Even the "Legalize Marijuana" people are somewhat hypocritical. They say "legalize pot, it's not as bad or heroin."

Oddly enough, most Republicans (the old white guys) actually want social security, which you would think they would view as anathema communist propaganda.

American politics are very strange.

tc• 17 years ago

Very few people want free markets. The rest just want the standard of living that only free markets can offer.

MaysonL• 17 years ago

And the few people who want free markets aren't willing to pay for them.

grandalf3• 17 years ago

i have an even simpler explanation: most people think that increasing government size/scope will make their lives better.

These are the same people of whom 40% believe Elvis is alive!

kragen• 17 years ago

The same thing happens between the armies of nations. Nation A's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation B; Nation B's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation A. Even though they're fighting each other, the civilians on both sides are very similar to each other, and the war makes them all worse off through taxation and slaughter.

The armies are also very similar to each other, in values and in training, and very different from the civilian population. In fact, they probably trained together in joint exercises or at WHISC before the war.

If you slice the identities one way, the attacks by the armies on the civilians show that the armies are dangerous to the civilians, and therefore civilians should endeavor to eliminate armies, as did the people of the United States in the American Revolution, and as did the people of Costa Rica during the previous century. But of course the more common way to look at it is that the attacks by Nation A show the great necessity for the civilians of Nation B to support the army of Nation B, in order to deter and defend against attacks from Nation A, and vice versa.

So armies, as a class, whip up support for themselves by attacking and killing the civilians whose support they depend on.

And so today in Israel and Palestine, each nation has strong popular support for organized violence against civilians on the other side.

Of course, historically the connection between armies and governments is extremely close.

Is there a way out? Are the Costa Ricans in imminent danger of invasion due to their lack of armed forces? Having armed forces didn't seem to help the Salvadorans, the Guatemalans, or the Nicaraguans when the US funded terrorist campaigns against their people, didn't help the Panamanians or the Granadans when the US decided to invade them, and didn't help Guatemala when the United Fruit Company organized a coup. In fact, in most of those cases, the army acted against its own people.

But would Honduras have avoided the Football War if they had had no army? Or would they now be a province of El Salvador? Would Cuba be a territory of the US, like Puerto Rico? (And would Cubans be better off if they were?)

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

There is a problem with the submitted essay that is a common problem with many essays on lesswrong: it writes about a matter that developed historically with insufficient examination of the history of the matter. Maybe the people submitting articles to lesswrong need to read more history more often.

The American two-party system is remarkable in how much the two parties do NOT insist on long-term ideological consistency. Each party shifts its positions and adds and subtracts party platform planks as new third parties introduce net points of view into political discourse. The parties are stable because their positions on issues are very unstable. If you compare the party platforms of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to those of a century ago, you will see on many issues a complete role reversal of the parties. Similarly, which party is more favored by southern voters or which party is more favored by black voters is far less stable than the general tendency that black voters and southern voters only occasionally favor the same party.

grandalf3• 17 years ago

that was not a cornerstone of his argument in the least. I wouldn't even say it was a part of it at all.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

How would you summarize his argument? Why did the title of the article refer to two parties?

grandalf3• 17 years ago

the missing piece of the essay is the question of whether "political entrepreneurs" should be considered legitimate.

Using group dynamics to achieve power is just a reality of human nature, as Elezier points out.

But Elezier jumps from this fat to assume that we should then be concerned about the unequal distribution of power between most people and the few political entrepreneurs (aka "power seekers").

It's hard to argue that all power seekers are bad, even if all do use group dynamics to gain and keep power.

So how to we determine which power seekers we consider legitimate?

kazuya• 17 years ago

Seems the author carefully and intentinally avoid talking about religions. Why?

The Two-Party Swindle

Related Stories