Planning The Neoliberal TakeOver Of The Democratic Party

I mean of course in an ideal world hell yes let's have a European multi-party system.

Sidebar, but this meme drives me nuts. Facts not in evidence that a multi-party system leads to "an ideal world".

I'm not saying that the American system is ideal or even better than a generic-proposition parliamentary system, but multi-party parliamentary systems have led to some pretty fucking bad outcomes over the past 100 years or so (or even the past 10 years lol).

The biggest substantive difference to multi-party vs 2-party winner-take-all elections is that, in a 2-party system, the parties/factions have to form their coalitions before the election. This is a bad thing when it drives good people to form bad alliances and ugly compromises to win elections. But it's a good thing when it prevents fringe parties from taking over with only a few seats in government, by swinging coalition dynamics.

I.e., both systems are better at some things and worse at other things. Each has tendencies towards particular kinds of negative and positive outcomes. If anything, the relative inflexibility of the American system seems to have historically done a better job of preventing the worst kinds of parliamentary abuses/procedural takeovers, while simultaneously hampering a lot of good policy-making. The fact that multi-party systems are generally better at being adaptable and responsive to new policy initiatives does not always and necessarily mean that they lead to universally better outcomes.

I'm not opposed to multi-party coalition-type governance, and I'm not saying that the American system is best or even better. But there is this weird kind of meme among certain educated "coastal elite" types where people will just throw out, offhand, how glaringly obvious it is that utopia would have some sort of multi-party parliamentary system. I'm not sure where it comes from, but it seems to be a kind of vague combination of europhilia, enlightened centrism, general contrarianism, and "second opinion bias".

It's intellectually lazy, and I think a little bit dangerous, the frequency with which this seems to percolate, unchallenged and unexamined, among people who are otherwise inclined towards skeptical, informed, evidence-based analysis.

It's like, maybe the ideal system of governance is some specific and narrow variant of a parliamentary system. It might that some exhaustive study of the best political science would come to that conclusion, and I would be happy to defer to such a study, if it exists or if it should come to exist.

But there have been some extraordinarily non-ideal societies that came about through multi-party coalition governance. So it's definitely at least a more nuanced reality than "multi-party>winner-take-all, obvs"

/r/neoliberal Thread