Third Parties in the Us Are More Important Than You Think

As a Dutch person I can actually offer a meaningful contribution for once.

In Holland we don’t have a ton of parties, due to covid. Fortunately we do have a lot of political parties. Like currently our House of Representatives (Tweede kamer) has 18 parties. That sounds like a clusterfuck, and to some extent it is, but it has a number of very important characteristics that help stabilise the political climate.

  1. You’ll never have a single party majority. You’ll always have to form a coalition government. This means that you don’t have these big swings to the left or right like in the US. It also means that you’ll never really get an extreme government, be it extreme left or extreme right. The government will always kinda sit somewhere in the acceptable range. This also helps avoid polarisation, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

  2. People have more choice, meaning you’ll generally avoid getting one-issue voters voting for a party they don’t actually support but just vote for them due to their one single stance on something. We have one issue parties for that. People in America who want to protect gun rights, for example, will always vote republican even when they don’t really agree with the majority of republican proposals because republicans are the party that is most likely to heed to their one single issue. In Holland we obviously have that to some extent, but you’ll generally vote for a party you like best in general, and if you have one specific thing then you either find a party whose literal only point is addressing that one problem (such as the animal rights party).

  3. The parties keep one another and the cabinet in check. In the US you guys appear to have a republican party that thinks politics means doing whatever the fuck you want with no consequences. This doesn’t really happen in Holland (at least not to that extent) because whenever a politician says something unacceptable, there are usually people from both right and left calling them out and acting angry. In America you’ve got the democrats and the republicans and one side gets shit from the other side of the political spectrum. In Holland, unless the party involved is at the ends of the spectrum, they’re probably going to get shit from both the parties to the right of them and the parties to the left. This is important because it helps prevent things that are unacceptable become acceptable because it’s only the other side of the aisle that’s whining. The ex-PM Mark Rutte got caught up in a massive clusterfuck surrounding the tax system and he got shat on by everyone from the tree hugging SJWs on the far left to the borderline klanmembers on the far right.

  4. Polarisation is avoided. There isn’t really a “us vs them” thing here because there are many parties. You can’t really put the “economy over everything” VVD and the “let’s do whatever greece did to its economy” SP in the same group. You’ve got parties scattered across the entire political spectrum, so you can’t really get the same kind of polarisation as in the US. There are a lot of voters who have so much choice they have to go and do these off-brand buzzfeed quizzes to see who they should vote for, and even then it’s a hard choice. You can easily have like 4 parties you’d vote for.

  5. Better representation. In the US the Republican Party encompasses everything from old people who just don’t want their situation to change (for better or for worse) to literal neonazis. The Democratic Party encompasses everything from young people who just want healthcare to people who read Vice articles. Both are pretty far extremes. If there were a party that sits in the middle or one that leans left or right, they’d get a ton of votes. The two party system in America is essentially like wanting to buy a lamp from Ikea and having to buy the entire company to get your lamp, and you have to deal with all the ugly shit with cryptic names.

Obviously there are a few drawbacks, such as the fact that some prominent members of parliament have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, while in a bigger party system you’ll have people who know their shit. Also debates are a bit of a nightmare and the campaigns are lame as fuck.

Two parties is not da wey.

/r/politics Thread Link - jacobinmag.com