Comment by sannysanoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sannysanoff | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be a matter of indifference to many that a persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is symptomatic of a profound societal schism. This is because such a division, in any configuration, maximizes the number of those who are discontented. As it is written, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." To my mind, this matter is of far greater significance than any secondary, tangible processes that may be occurring in consequence.

Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature. Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage, as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails.

Thus, economic factors — for an electoral campaign is, in essence, a contest of capital—having, in effect, subverted the very system of democratic elections, inevitably lead to the decay of nations that religiously adhere to the mathematics of a single percentage point as the sole criterion of legitimacy. In optimizing for democratic representation, social stability and equilibrium have been forfeited.

It is akin to the psychological paradox: "I am correct, and all acknowledge it, yet why do I not experience contentment?" It is because one has optimized for correctness — or in the context of elections, for fairness and representativeness — rather than for overall well-being. Such is the predicament inherent in the pursuit of a mere fifty-one percent majority.

> as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails.

There are other ways of doing voting and organizing a democracy that are less prone to this winner take all dynamic. The foundational principle of democracy is consent of the governed. The details of how that's achieved can vary widely.

One is to do the vote differently, such as with ranked choice voting where voters are free to choose the candidate they actually want without "wasting" their vote.

Another is parliamentary style systems with proportional representation, which allow more than just two parties to have a voice and require the parties to form coalitions to govern.

Lastly, you can vote on actual policy proposals instead of just on politicians and parties. It's not either-or -- it's possible to have a system with both representatives and direct voting on major points of contention.

That is indeed the case. Perhaps I should have clarified that my comments are directed at the current political system of the United States. The purpose of my message was to highlight that there is a certain opposing force at play, one that is shifting the working system – specifically, the US electoral system – towards a range of diminished effectiveness. Essentially, the rules are being manipulated in such a way that while they may technically function, the fundamental objectives are still being undermined. These objectives, as outlined in the US Constitution, are to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare. It is necessary to address this systemic vulnerability, as this issue is becoming increasingly relevant in many places.

I disagree. I think the US system with 2 parties is superior to the systems in many other nations where there are multiple parties. The problem with multiple parties is that it is difficult to form a governing coalition. In the US the problem of coalition building simply does not exits (I wonder how many people in the US are even aware of the concept). Basically, the coalition building is done ahead of the elections, by various interest groups aligning themselves with one of the two parties. This alignment is voluntary and dynamic, so the shape of the two parties continuously changes. The debate seems quite polarized and this is indeed a problem. But I think it stems more from the way people's exposure to information has changed with the advent of the internet and social media, and less from how the US organizes its electoral process.

The problem with two parties is everything is left or right. Coalition building can be hard but the work bridges ideas/approaches which pull more people together.

Two party systems end up governing from their extreme positions while trying to pull 1% over.

All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.

It's 2025, we should be able to have more granular control over the direction our governments take, and not have to rely on some nebulous "party" or politicians grouping that forces us to deal with compromises. And not only compromises, but all the deal-making and trading that the groups make with eachother.

> All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.

This sounds nice but if people can't even vote for favorable outcomes now, how can we expect them to make informed decisions on dozens of matters of public policy?

The solution usually proposed in systems like Liquid Democracy, is in the form of an online platform where issues to be voted on are presented alongside all the different opinions and perspectives relevant to that decision. Education needs to go hand-in-hand with empowerment.

Having all the information available is but one part of the challenge. It has never been easier to get educated on all sides of every issue we face, yet...

The problem still remains that we can't expect individuals (let alone millions of them) to be able to appropriately weigh in on things that require more than 5 minute reading on an online platform. One cannot gain an expert understanding, nor an appreciation of the nuances that come with that, in that situation.

I think this is some sort of fallacy that (us) intellectuals easily fall into. Education and understanding of a topic for the most part does not sway peoples' opinion. And democracy shouldn't be about that, because then it becomes a game of "who can convince the most people" and "who can indoctrinate the most", rather than simply being the will of the people that they naturally form as part of existing as individuals and interacting with the world around them.

I'm confused. Are you suggesting that people can/should be able to make decisions about individual policy decisions - as I took your GP comment to mean - or are you saying that that's antithetical to democracy...?

Yes - I 100% think we should allow all voters to be able to vote on individual policy decisions.

But democracy shouldn't be about giving them that choice only if they are educated and informed on the topic, that is antithetical to democracy. Their choice matters whether they are informed on it or not, that's their choice - period. Of course, it would be good to give them all the info we can on the topic and we should strive to do our best to help them be informed. And if that's the case, and we agree democracy is about the will of the people, not their "expertise" and "knowledge" on a topic, then there is absolutely no reason why we should deny the possibility of more direct-democracy type decision making.

I don't think anybody was suggesting it as some kind hard requirement - that would indeed probably be dangerous. I am still confused by your comment though

> Education and understanding of a topic for the most part does not sway peoples' opinion. And democracy shouldn't be about that, because then it becomes a game of "who can convince the most people" and "who can indoctrinate the most", rather than simply being the will of the people that they naturally form as part of existing as individuals and interacting with the world around them.

It sounds like you're saying understanding of a topic should come second to how citizens "feel" about it. There's no denying that's how it is much of the time, but should it be?

People, as part of existing as part of the world, naturally form hatred or distrust of various groups of people based on their personal interactions. How is it healthier for society to act on those feelings, vs electing people and building institutions that act based on reason and good faith?

I'm not sure how to parse/take your comment. Are you saying people are too uninformed to make decisions on public policy?

Look, if that's the case, and that's how we want government to be run, then let's just come out with it. Let's not pretend that people have a choice. But until that day comes, democracy means will of the people and in this modern technological age that translates to people being enabled to choose what they want.

We've lost the "excuse" to use coordination, tallying and "time to count votes" as a means to push representative-type democracy, and the sooner we get there the better the world will be. Because right now we have this schism, and it's tearing societies apart.

You suggested we should stop voting for parties/politicians and instead vote based on individual policies. I suggest that's not a great idea, since to make informed decisions on such things requires more expert understanding than an individual has. This is not, I think, a crazy position - it is why we elect politicians at all.

Representative democracy is not a technical challenge, it's a human challenge. If reigned in, electing representatives to act on your behalf is a far better system because being even close to informed on the topics and nuance and long-term thinking it takes to govern is a full time job that most people simply are not equipped - in terms of time and expertise - to handle. And we don't even have guaranteed holiday time to research and vote once every year, let alone every few days as this would require.

Sucks that they keep electing lunatics. But do you really think the party who ran almost entirely on hurting others wouldn't independently vote for hurting others? Or that the 100,000,000 people who didn't vote to stop it would suddenly vote? Or that people wouldn't look toward leaders and form parties so they can quickly get a feel of the room based on like minds?

Politicians being corrupt is, at the end of the day, mostly the fault of the people. They refuse to hold them accountable. I mean, they elected a convicted felon - a convicted rapist - an impeached president - a known con man and womanizer - who works with dictators and mafias and tried to overthrow America. And they're still cheering on every insane idea.

> Two party systems end up governing from their extreme positions while trying to pull 1% over.

Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither party speaks to them.)

It seems to me that the thing that pushes parties in the US to the extremes is the primary system.

The problem is not in getting the 1% at the end but it si the primary system.

But that is true in all two party states.

The people who take part and organise the party will not be in the centre undecideds they will be those who are off centre. To become the leader you need to get the votes from the party workers, these will tend away from the centre so you get more extreme leaders.

With the two party system the coalitions are made behind closed doors in the party.

>To become the leader you need to get the votes from the party workers

That can't be the whole story because Trump never bothered to win over party workers when he won in 2016.

OK I was thinking about the UK party system where party members vote.

In the US it is just the registered voters that need to be won over.

It’s the primary system and, ActBlue/WinRed, the ideological composition of party apparatchiks, and diversity.

> Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither party speaks to them.)

Primary elections are the problem. The moderates who would win bigly in the real election are rapidly washed out during the primary season.

It's not all or nothing. Within EU nations, you will find many systems that sit within a spectrum between a rigid 2 party system like the US, and a full blown multi-party coalition type government broken down into specific levels, like Belgium.

It’s well documented how harmful the two party system is and I don’t find this even close to convincing me it’s not the biggest problem with the US, as far as our system of government. Many of our other problems stem from it.

Without nitpicking the typical coalition details here, I want to consider a more general point. It's somewhat self evidently not a great thing for countries to be swapping systems back and forth dramatically based on margins of a few percent. It's unstable and will inevitably lead to a systemic collapse as the shifts grow greater and greater over time. It's rocking a boat back and forth.

I would go one step further and say that executive power should be dramatically reigned in, and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass. And laws also have to be renewed every 'x' years with a similarly large consensus, perhaps with a method similar to constitutional amendment to allow for permanent laws. Under such a system you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything. And I think this would be a very good thing.

Such a system would also completely do away with divide and conquer as a political strategy, which again is also a very good thing - as that's likely one of the biggest causes of instability in the Western world today.

> you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything

You could also refuse to collaborate to do everything. This would result in an anarchist system where power/money has the ability to do whatever they want without regulatory oversight and the public are unable to vote to give themselves any rights they can't take by force.

I think that's assuming the status quo of horrible divides. In the past many social bills passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. For instance the Pure Food and Drug Act [1], which would lead to the FDA, was passed in 1906 by a 90%+ margin in both the House and Senate. I mean who's going to oppose outlawing mislabeled products? In a country that hasn't been trained to hate 'the other side', basically nobody.

But in modern times a typical social experiment (of which there are a zillion on YouTube) is to describe some policy passed by a President/party but swap the names to 'the other side.' People's response to the policy will invariably sharply shift. People aren't even thinking about what they think is a good idea anymore, but seeing everything through a hyper-partisan lens. That's obviously not conducive to bipartisan acts, pretty much ever.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act

The party that actively attempts to destroy a government by blocking all bills, then point to the underfunded, broken system and say "government does work, you should sell all of that to a billionaire" would LOVE your idea.

The median voter theorem does some work to dampen the rocking.

> and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass.

I think this is trying to solve the wrong problem. If our concern was that the second the new party gets that 51% margin they suddenly start passing a ton of laws, that would help reign it in. But that's not really what is happening. Congress has become profoundly unproductive in the last few decades. As an example, the last time Congress passed a budget on time, which is the bare minimum of functioning, was in the 1990s. By basically any metric, Congress is becoming less and less capable of passing laws. Requiring 80% consensus would make that even harder. And requiring laws to be reviewed every X years would greatly increase the responsibilities of Congress to keep the government functioning.

It's more about the equilibrium and motivations that this system creates. When everything is decided on a 1% majority, there's no real need to cooperate on anything. If you don't have power now, you probably will in a few years and then you can do whatever you want. So you can just focus on getting reelected in the mean time and vote no on everything until then. This, btw, is exactly what happens - Congress spends most of their time in office simply working on their next election. Term limits would seriously help here.

What you mention about budgets is a good example of this. Neither side wants to cooperate on anything at all. So in the House you get things like one side votes 100% yes, the other side 100% no. And then it gets passed to the Senate. The reason budgets freeze up in the Senate is the filibuster where you need a 60% majority to pass. So suddenly there's actually some cooperation required which is when both sides tend to start working together, a little, to add this or remove that.

But with an 80% consensus required, you need to start the cooperation immediately in the House because you can't just roughshod your fantasy budget through on a 1% margin. And none of this is going to change in 4 years, or 40. If you want to get things done, you need to start viewing 'the other side' as just other people working towards what they see as a desirable direction for the country, instead of an opposing team to be conquered and strawmanned into the worst evil since Hitler.

That persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is emblematic of a failed political system. There's never just two sides to any real-life issue, but having only two parties forces everything to be viewed through that binary lens. This damage runs much deeper than just politics, everything in society has to be all-or-nothing: it's always good vs evil, you're with us or against us, you're successful or an utter failure, you're either rich or poor, etc.

How can you say this with the current state of US politics? It's clearly inferior leading to such poor outcomes.

People act as if it's a fluke, as if "if we could get back to how things were just before all this, things would stay better!". No, we don't want to drive off the cliff, but we do want back to that time we barged full speed past all the "road closed ahead" signs.

By that logic a one party system is the most superior system, since by definition everyone is on the same page.

We got Trump in part because people felt unable to fully express their opinion - they felt it was either the status quo person or the anti status quo person, with no nuance in between.

And there are still divisions - the freedom caucus, the progressive "squad", the swing politicians. Those politicians should be in parties that reflect them rather than Frankenstein's monsters of parties.

Coalitions are made to enable things like voting on government budgets before funding runs out .... But that problem does not seem solved in the US

Coalition building is not a problem, but it is still very difficult to govern in the US. In order to enact meaningful legislation aside from a budget, you need a majority of the House of Representatives, 60 Senators (in practice, because of the filibuster), the President, and the Supreme Court to all align.

These problems could be prevented by a ranked choice vote (your vote transfers to your next candidate when your favorite is eliminated) to determine the executive, and your first choice used to determine legislative seats proportionally. This would often mean that the winning party is governing without majority in the parliament (or equivalent), but I actually see that as a good thing. I mean, what happened to Checks and Balances?

The U.S. did have a brief flirtation with what other countries call "failure to form a governing coalition" in 2023. It was a bit less embarrassing than elsewhere because (for somewhat related reasons) our legislature is historically weak right now, but it did happen.

I think we'll see more of this, now that the parties are so ideologically separate from each other. With such a narrow majority, any tiny intraparty fracture has the potential to break a coalition.

Thats why no laws should be possible to pass without a 2/3 vote. 50% + 1 vote will always lead to a weak mandate and an accusation of tyranny. Let them haggle and if it's not worth passing at 2/3 of a vote it's not worth passing at all.

> Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature.

What? No they are not.

This is 100% created by the FPTP voting system. It is the single cause that leads to this, everywhere where it's used. FPTP means that if your party cannot hoover up a base that gets 50%+1 of the votes, you change your platform until it can. The stable equilibrium is two parties at very nearly 50% split. Then both parties have to cater to their 50%, can ignore the other 50%, and do not benefit from co-operation across party lines.

This equilibrium is not visible in democratic countries that use some kind of proportional representation. In such systems, parties tend to be smaller, and necessarily have to co-operate to form government.

Yes, this, exactly. I was going to write the same thing. FPTP produces this result.

In the US, the combination of FPTP voting and campaign finance rules lead to congress being fundamentally broken.

Moreover, I'm thinking that modern information tools (Internet, polls, tracking, etc). have lead to better and more accurate forecasting, which in turn allowed the parties to apply ever narrower targeting at hyper-focused groups and minimize wasted effort past getting the majority needed to win elections. Basically as there is less and less noise the battles get closer and closer to the theoretical equilibrium point.

And this is bad because it causes huge shifts based on the whims of what, fractions of a percent of the population?

The mechanisms are economic in nature if you assume the context of a first past the post electoral system.

It's worth repeating that FPTP maximizes the number of those who are discontented: Parties lose all incentives to appeal to more than 50%+1, so the remaining 49.9% are left high and dry. This implies that a proportional representation system will be more stable, because a higher percentage of the voters will be represented.

> Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage

That only makes sense if the factions are interchangeable for their members, i.e. if it's the same to them whether they win as part of one faction or the other, as long as they're on the winning side in the end.

And I'm pretty sure that's not true for most regular people.

It may be true for large corporations and wealthy individuals, though.

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