17 thoughts on “Not Just The White House”

1. I wonder if a lot of the Republican legislators who decided to retire this year are having second thoughts?

   I hope not. Many of them are retiring for good and plenty reasons. People like Palin because she is not one of the old (corrupt) guard.

   I like Palin for the most part, but I’m still waiting to see if all this is hoop-la a bounce rather than a launch. Will she still have the same draw in November?

   One of the best management books I have ever read advised that when looking to fill a position (any position) an outside candidate should look at least 30% better on paper than any in-house candidate for the same position to be worth consideration. Flaws don’t go on the resume, do you’ve got to discount the outsider for his unknown (but inevitable) flaws.

   Most people don’t do that however. They believe the resume, and then are disillusioned when the flaws show up. Since Palin is a human being I must assume that she has flaws, so I wonder how many independents will continue to “lean” Republican once the sheen wears off.

2. I gotta agree. A lot of those retirees were part of the problem and there are too many who should have left but are staying (like Young). It may give the Dems a short term advantage, but another Congress like the last two years of Pelosi and Reid will be good in the long run. Instead of just being “do-nothing”, I can see them actively blocking all the reforms (good or not) proposed by McCain &co. By this time in ‘010, it could very well be the Dems who’ll be looking for a way to cash out before getting kicked out. (And if The One! does win, they’ll overreach even more than Clinton did back in ’93. They can’t help it, because they’ve got a decade’s backlog of policy to make up, and will try to do it all at once.)

3. I think that it is a bit early to start reading much into the congressional numbers. I suspect that the GOP will benefit from the meltdown of The One, but that benefit will have only a minor impact on the overall congressional picture. The GOP’s problems with congress are deep seated and well understood by the population at large, and though I have little love for the Dems, I cannot help but think that a good shellacking in the congressional races might be a useful way of clearing out some of the less desirable members of the House. Of course, the cynic in me knows that they will replace corrupted GOP congressmen with corrupted Dem congressmen, so what the heck…

   One thing I do find interesting is that there seems to be a much stronger realization on the part of the voting public (in the last month or so) that the Dems have controlled congress for hte last two years, and things have only gotten worse. I cannot wonder if the idea of making Harry and Nancy the face of Congress has finally caught on…

4. It’s times like this that I really get upset at the voting system in this country. Democracy is the best of poor options, to paraphrase Churchill, but majority-approval voting is the worst of good options. A range-plurality system (the best choice, mathematically speaking) would allow anyone to vote in a sensible manner without having to choose only between the Democrat and Republican candidates or “throwing away” their vote.

   For instance, I could fill out my Presidential ticket like this (assuming a range of 5):

   Simberg/Reynolds – 5
   McCain/Palin – 4
   Barr/?? – 3
   Obama/Biden – 2
   Nader/?? – 1

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

5. Oops, my bad. We currently use “plurality” voting. Approval voting would be a marked improvement.

6. Brock,
   I think I would prefer a system where the actual effect of who was on the ticket was so small that you could flip your preference list and the outcome would be the same. The point of limited government is not that it ties the hands of the guy you like, its to keep the guy you don’t like’s hands off.

   -MM

7. Mike,

   Sure, but even if you cut government “services” to the bone you’d still have the military and the judiciary/police. Those guys need more watching than the Dept of Agriculture, and humans aren’t going to evolve beyond needing their services any time soon.

   Further, you’ll never (ever) get a small-government legislature using the current system.

8. Ugh, no, Brock. The voting system we have is designed to magnify the advantages of the leading candidate, so that he tends to sweep everything not long after taking the lead. It’s similar to the Republican primary in that respect: once a front-runner emerges, he tends to crush everyone else and the race is over quickly.

   And it’s the same with parties. The system, as you well know, is set up so that at most two parties (Government and Loyal Opposition) are plausible, and third parties generally have zero influence unless and until one of the parties implodes (as happened with the Federalists in the 1810s, and with the Democratic Republicans in the 1830s), or until some huge shift in the public mood produces a new party that grows rapidly, for example the Civil War giving rise to the Republican Party, or the slavery issue producing the Whigs in the 1840s and 1850s.

   This is a good thing. If you want to have a powerful government in a peaceful country that is so culturally and ideologically heterogeneous as the United States, you have to quickly decide what is the majority viewpoint, and then strongly encourage people to get behind it. If you don’t, if you allow power to all kinds of splinter groups and minority associations, you end up with weak governments and with permanently alienated minorities (e.g. the Le Pen people in France) who cling to tiny shards of power because they have no real motivation to compromise and join a larger coalition.

   Consider the difference between the Republican primary this year and the Democratic. You may not be thrilled with McCain — many have said he wasn’t their first choice, or second — but he’s acceptable to the Republicans, and the voting system forced his victory swiftly, and strongly encouraged everyone else to sort themselves out, into McCain’s OK I guess supporters and McCain no way no how opponents.

   On the Democratic side, you had a bruising and brutal and expensive primary, because Hillary’s supporters could not win but could keep hope for a miracle alive, right through the convention, and you still have bitter feelings and divisions, because the encouragement to take your stand, either for or against the winner, is less. It’s not a recipe for stability, and you can see the fissures running through the Democratic Party right now. This is less because they are a coalition of diverse viewpoints — because that is equally true of the Republicans — but because their fetishization of minority viewpoints mean the tendency to compromise with each other, make peace, agree on large stuff while agreeing to disagree on small, is less.

   The larger point is that the idea of voting is not to keep government as close as possible to the momentary whim of the people, nor to make sure every minority viewpoint is given a tiny proportional share of power. Rather, it’s to make sure government is generally in line with the majority’s point of view, averaged over time, and to suppress the power of small minorities, so that they are encouraged to socialize, compromise with the majority, and get in the mainstream. The great fear of the Founders when they set up a more democratic government than the usual style of the day was factionalism and division, and, indeed, that very force tore apart post-Revolution France, post-Revolution Russia, and post-Revolution Spain.

   It’s nice to feel your particular viewpoint is given its precise proportional share of importance by the majority. But however pleasant to the individual, this is not a recipe for social stability.

9. Carl,

   I don’t really agree entirely. The reason that parliamentary systems have that weakness that arises from many parties is that the governing party has to retain a majority. That is not the case in the US: once the official is elected, he’s there for the term, and only truly exceptional circumstances can cause an elected official to be removed from office (and then by other elected officials). The Founders’ original intent was to cut across natural factions by balancing the States against each other, as well as the branches of government against each other, and to devolve power down to the lowest possible level. That was fine and good when the Federal government hadn’t centralized power and when travel was difficult and time-consuming. But in the current situation, our system encourages factionalism. The two-party system encourages each group to come to a swift conclusion, but then to fight tooth and nail to deny the right of the other party to even have an opinion about the issue in question. Direct election of Senators made this far worse by removing the States’ voices from the Federal government, leaving the Senate as a smaller House with longer terms.

   I am not a huge fan of alternative voting systems, despite their mathematical superiority. Every voting system can produce perverse outcomes, and in this case simplicity trumps greater fidelity to national will, because in any kind of complex voting scheme, the number of ballot challenges and resulting confusion and fear of having votes stolen goes up exponentially. But I am in favor of finding systems that increase the number of parties that can be represented, such as proportional representation in the House. (Such a system would give more people the ability to find the person they are willing to have represent them, and more opportunities for leaders to come forward, even though it wouldn’t help as much at the Presidential level).

   Frankly, I just don’t see how our system would become less stable with alternative voting schemes or alternative selection algorithms, because in the end it still take a majority to pass a law and supermajorities to impeach and so on.

10. Jeff, it sounds in the first place like you’re paraphrasing Madison’s argument of why a large republic might actually work better than a small one (which was contrary to the opinions of the day). He argued that the existence of so many factions would force them to work together, because otherwise they had not just a small, but a zero hope of gaining power.

    But I don’t see how that supports your point. Surely, then, if you hope to force factions to start cooperating, you want a voting system that strongly discourages minority viewpoints from refusing to compromise by holding out the hope of some power.

    Let me give an analogy. I had a student once come to me and complain about his grade on a test. He pointed out that in one problem, he’d gotten about half of the problem right, but received far less than half of the credit. I agreed (to his astonishment), and said that was quite deliberate. I said that I always gave partial credit that was less than proportional to the amount of the problem you’d got right. Why? Because that put a big premium — a big motivation — on getting the problem 100% right. And that was an important goal: we do not want physicians and builders of bridges and airplane pilots who make decisions and take actions that are each 80% right. We prefer they make decisions that are 100% right 4/5 of the time. That is, one fully correct and one completely wrong decision are better than two 50% correct decisions, simply because in the real world, “50% correct” is usually functionally equivalent to “100% wrong.”

    In the same sense, giving minority viewpoints a less than proportional share of power strongly encourages them to do whatever it takes — compromise, educate others or themselves, become more flexible, creative, whatever — to become a majority viewpoint. We put a big premium on constructing a coalition or viewpoint that is sufficiently generally attractive that it can attract majority, not just a large minority, support. That strongly discourages factionalism and encourages compromise and coalition-building, which is the point.

    The two-party system encourages each group to come to a swift conclusion, but then to fight tooth and nail to deny the right of the other party to even have an opinion about the issue in question.

    So? That “fight tooth and nail” is a good thing, believe it or not. That’s called “working out your differences.” In the alternative, the factions do not even talk to each other. They may remain more respectful, but that’s because they don’t really listen to each other, don’t care about the other’s viewpoint at all.

    It’s like the difference between a married couple with differing opinions about some important issue (child-rearing, money) and a male and female stranger. The strangers will certainly fight less, and be more respectful and polite. But if your goal is a joint decision that is robust, the married couple are the ones who make it, because they work out the differences and cut an enduring compromise with each other.

    I think it’s a mistake to think that the level of rancor and argument that you see in the national political process is somehow more than is justified by the natural differences between the different groups in the United States. We really are that heterogeneous a nation, with a whole lot of groups with powerfully conflicting interests and motives. There really are that strong of ideological differences between groups of us. That being the case, it’s better that we argue them out fiercely and come to some compromise we all hate, but with which we can live, than if we just ignore each other until the thing explodes in our face.

    Arguably this was one of the great follies of the Founders, that they came to a “gentleman’s agreement” to simply not talk about the big issue dividing North and South, slavery. Since they didn’t thrash it out then, in the 1790s, when there were a mere 700,000 slaves in the United States and Southerners grew tobacco and wheat, not cotton, it blew up horribly 70 years later, when there were 4 million slaves, cotton was king in the South, and the problem was far, far more difficult to solve.

    A similar case can be made for the suppression of any national-level free discussion in the Soviet Union, which allowed the ethnic and cultural differences in the various Republics to be ignored, so that they exploded into violence when the USSR fell apart.

11. Carl, I admit I didn’t read the whole of your posts, but that’s because I quickly saw that you didn’t understand my position.

    I was not arguing for some kind of system that created minority gridlock or proportional representation. I was specifically talking about a Presidential race that can only have one winner. A rating system (as I mentioned) would allow me to say “Simberg is my first choice, but if no one else likes him I prefer McCain to Obama, and even Obama is better than Nader.”

    Or, in the Republican primary I could have still voted for Romney (which I did) while also saying “But they’re all better than Huckabee” (which I wish I could have).

    This is a Good Thing(TM). It preserves the winner-takes-all nature of our current system but allows for a more accurate choice of who the winners are. It cures the spoiler effect and allows for a third-party (such as Simberg/Reynolds) to actually have a chance of winning a plurality of voters.

    Under my system George HW Bush would have won in 1992. McCain would have won the Republican primary in 2000. Against Bush and Nader Al Gore would have taken Florida. No spoilers. But also, in 2008 under my system, Lieberman could run as an independent right down the center and beat both McCain and Obama. It really is about a Majority of Americans electing someone who represents the majority, rather than being forced to choose among several poor choices.

    Also, I think you strongly overestimate the ability of our current system to settle on a majority viewpoint. It does not. It encourages polarization around two points, rather than a single center. Although McCain is an exception, you can see how our current system is very likely to produce results where neither major party candidate represents the center of the nation as a whole. It encourages factionalization, rather than compromise and centrality.

12. Arguably this was one of the great follies of the Founders, that they came to a “gentleman’s agreement” to simply not talk about the big issue dividing North and South, slavery.
    You’re assuming then that forcing the issue in 1790 would not have resulted in the immediate creation of a Southern Confederacy?

    Interesting.

13. If you want to have a powerful government in a peaceful country that is so culturally and ideologically heterogeneous as the United States, you have to quickly decide what is the majority viewpoint, and then strongly encourage people to get behind it.

    Suppose you don’t want to have a powerful central government? Wrong premise results in wrong conclusions as far as I can see. Plus, this appears to be a non sequitur. The US’s voting system isn’t quickly deciding a “majority” viewpoint, that’s part of the problem with the current scheme that would fixed by a superior voting system. And it doesn’t encourage people to get behind the president elect. The procedures outlined in the Constitution do that.

    Further, while I’d love to see voting for the US president improved, we also need to keep in mind that there are many other elections. We can demonstrate one of these new voting schemes on a smaller scale and in that way get people behind it.

14. Brock, I argue you have missed one of the major — if not the major purposes of voting in a republic. It is not to make sure your wishes as an individual are as precisely taken into account as possible. It is, roughly speaking, to make sure that all the rest of us can be confident that the President (say) represents the choice of the majority. (He may very well not be their first choice, indeed he could hardly be. I, for example, think that my father would make a better President than any of the candidates now running. But I doubt the rest of you would agree.)

    Let’s say we implement your scheme. Now everyone fills out their ballot, and some big computer program sorts out all the preferences hmm, these people voted for Simberg, but he’s out because he wasn’t enough first choices, so now we go to second on the list dum de dum and, after a million computations, a winner emerges.

    Now how, exactly, do I, J. Random Voter, interpret that result? Suppose, just for the sake of argument — and it could very easily happen — the guy who is the winner is the first choice of nobody. In what sense am I convinced that the President has been chosen by the majority? Not a lot, I can tell you. Sure, you can show me the computer program, and I can sit and follow through the algebra with you, provided I have the patience and the knack. But it does not have the plain, emotional, simple directness of the statement: No less than 50% of eligible voters plus 1 punched the ticket for this guy. He’s it.

    I submit your difficulties with the system should better be corrected at the “farm team” level, where we sort out the competing candidates for President and narrow the field to a manageable number among whom we can decide. I doubt very much that fiddling with the vote — making it much more complicated — is going to help that.

    You’re assuming then that forcing the issue in 1790 would not have resulted in the immediate creation of a Southern Confederacy?

    I’d be a little surprised if it did, yes. The South was not nearly as invested in slavery in 1790 as in 1860, and the North was not nearly as invested in abolitionism. If the issue had been addressed squarely, I think there’s a good chance some compromise leading to the eventual demise of slavery would have been possible. For one thing, the most respected Southern leaders of the day (e.g. Washington, Jefferson, Madison) were explicitly in favor of such a solution, and against the indefinite propagation of slavery. It’s no accident that Liberia was founded in the 1820s nor that its capital was named Monrovia.

    But suppose it didn’t work out that way. Suppose the Carolinas and Georgia declined to ratify a Constitution containing an explicit sunset for slavery. So what? Indeed, a separate confederacy may have been formed, but I doubt very much the rest of the states would have gone to war to force them into the Union. So there would have been no Civil War, and subsequent century of bitterness, no Jim Crow (in the [Northern] United States), no endless civil rights dialogue, blah blah. Black men would have been free from the beginning.

    And, yes, there would have been this small slave-owning country on our souther border, which would have had an interesting history, perhaps not especially successful economically and demographically. We might imagine that sometime in the 19th century they would have spontaneously rejected slavery themselves, as Russia did, and perhaps then ask for union with the north. But either way, it’s hard to see how this would perturb the course of greatness of the United States, and indeed the lack of a Civil War and profound racial troubles might have made it greater sooner.

    It encourages polarization around two points, rather than a single center.

    Well, first of all, I for one prefer that. God forbid the country should ever turn into Ein Volk with Ein Fuehrer, because I’m damn sure I won’t like it one bit. I have no confidence that the Utopia the rest of you bozos erect will be any place I want to live. I’m right glad that in general, if I don’t like what the government is doing, there’s always a powerful opposition party I can join to leverage my dissatisfaction.

    Secondly, the “polarization” is logically inevitable, unless we are all robots. It’s defined by “government” and “opposition.” Opposition without government can’t exist, of course, but government without opposition is, vide supra, an Orwellian nightmare. So there can’t be fewer than two poles. The only thing we can do by messing with the system is create more than two poles, i.e. factionalism. That fact that you intend to bring harmony and peace doesn’t matter — what matters is what you’d actually achieve, and if the only direction you can change things is towards more factionalism, and you change things…well, do the math.

    Suppose you don’t want to have a powerful central government?

    Then you need to build yourself a time machine, zip back to 1780s, and make your case to the states debating ratification of the Constitution. Failing that, you could try to get the 16th Amendment repealed. You could try being contrary, e.g. vote Republican for President and Democratic for Congress, or vice versa, and then switch off every few years. However, the most likely result of that is that your vote simply becomes noise, meaningless, unless you can get some kind of mass coordinated movement going — which seems, you know, a bit self-contradictory let’s form a huge collective movement to limit…uh…huge collective undertakings like government.

    The US’s voting system isn’t quickly deciding a “majority” viewpoint,

    Why not? You go in the booth in November, and by the next day we know which, of the candidates available, the majority prefers. Simple as that.

    I think you’re mistaking the ideal of the republic for the ideal of finding a magic government, President, policy, et cetera, which is the preferred Number 1 choice of a majority of the population. But you do not even know that such a thing exists, and, I would argue, the evidence of human nature and history argues quite strongly that it does not. I mean, can you get a majority of your family to consistently agree on the best possible dinner, movie, summer vacation, homework and bedtime policy, choice of channel to watch on the tube? Not if yours is anything like mine. So why do you think such magic solutions exist for 200 million people?

    Fact is, it’s a miracle we can agree on anything at all except for the vaguest and broadest platitudes. If we have a system that fairly quickly brings us leaders that are sufficiently popular (or insufficiently unpopular) that the country has a peaceful change of power every four years, and large groups do not get so angry they turn to violent resistance, then we’re doing well. I wouldn’t mess with “pretty good” in a quixotic pursuit of “perfect” that no similarly numerous and heterogeneous group of people have achieved in the history of the species.

15. > The reason that parliamentary systems have that weakness that arises from many parties is that the governing party has to retain a majority. That is not the case in the US: once the official is elected, he’s there for the term,

    The factionalism problems in existing parliarmentary systems are not due to “elections at any time”, they’re due to a lack of majorities. The “elections at any time” merely changes when the minority partner can do things, but not really.

    > But I am in favor of finding systems that increase the number of parties that can be represented, such as proportional representation in the House.

    Suppose that the House had 40% dems, 40% repubs, 6% greens, 5% progressives, 5% libertarians, and 4% whigs.

    The house leadership, and control of the agenda, can flip any day that the greens or progressives decide that they’re being “dis’d”. That doesn’t cause a new election, but it does flip the govt.

    By forcing the more successful green and progressive candidates into the dem party and marginalizing the loons, the house leadership doesn’t flip between elections.

    Yes, proportional allocations would put more of the loons into office. Instead of one Barbara Lee, there would be 10. That’s another argument against proportional allocation.

16. Apparently no one read the link to Wikipedia or understood either of my posts. Let me spell this out.

    1. I am NOT suggesting proportional representation. Each Congressional district still elects just one person. Each state still elects one Senator (per election). There is still only one President.

    2. The rating voting system is NOT complicated. Netflix, Amazon and HotOrNot use it to rate movies/books/hot chicks. Everyone in the world uses it and understands how it works, and it works well. It is not only dead simple to use and understand but it consistently produces the best results given subjective criteria (like political attributes, literary value, or attractiveness). Smart people with fancy math degrees have proven this in the same sense they’ve proven 1+1=2.

    The sole purpose of my proposal is to:

    1. Cure the spoiler effect, so that Ross Perot doesn’t hand the election to Bill Clinton (or Nader to Bush). It is a FACT that using our system means a third-party candidate will ALWAYS cause the biggest-minority candidate to win, not the majority candidate. This system would only increase the majority’s confidence in the electoral outcome.

    2. Allow for new entry of pols/parties. God knows the Reps and Dems have this country’s politics locked up. Almost everyone in Congress has been there too long. There is ZERO chance that (Pick your hero) could start his own party and get people elected; but wouldn’t you want someone like (Pick your hero) to be able to challenge the establishment in every part of the country? He’d only win if the majority elected him, but at least this gives new entrants a chance.

    Sources:
    Gaming the Vote
    Your presidential candidate: Hot or not?

    Voting experts — academics who study what’s known as “social choice theory” — have long complained that the counting system the United States uses for most state and federal elections, called plurality voting, is probably the worst electoral system one can design.

    …in at least five of the 45 presidential elections that the United States has held since 1828 (the first year that presidents were picked through a popular vote), the plurality vote caused the second most popular candidate to win.

    That’s an 11.1% rate of error. We can do better. We should do better when selecting the leader of the free world.

    Arrow’s impossibility theorem
    RangeVoting.org

17. > in at least five of the 45 presidential elections that the United States has held since 1828 (the first year that presidents were picked through a popular vote), the plurality vote caused the second most popular candidate to win.

    That’s only if you think that popular vote is “correct”, that being “double popular” in California should trump unpopular in Nebraska.

    The winner-take-all nature of the electoral college is a problem, but the state-level bias is a feature. We’re electing a president of the united states, not president of urban coastal regions.

    The electoral college reduces the effects of state-level political monocultures, forcing presidents to win where there’s dispute. This is a good thing.

Comments are closed.