[PaulHoule]

There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.

[estearum]

99% of every person's beliefs are driven by what "the right people told them," of course.

That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.

Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."

[pydry]

>half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus

Their beliefs are driven by a different set of oligarchs and imperial mandarins who have their own set of self serving reality distortion fields.

The companies which donate to both sides and the countries which collect enough komptomat are often able to set up bipartisan reality distortion fields.

[estearum]

See prior comment

[jfengel]

That's how parties work, of necessity. They are all uneasy alliances of people who can barely tolerate each other. People find the one that supports their most important issues and hopefully few things they really detest. Then they have to pay at least lip service to all of it. By getting everyone else's support, at least one or two of your favorite issues get worked on.

In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.

[eucyclos]

Having seen student politics with and without parties - my student union had them, my engineering society banned them - I'm convinced that it's not bad voters that ruin democracies but political parties. Parties need to simplify their messages to get buy in, and promote a 'team first' over 'issues first' mentality in their members. They're anathema to principles of honest debate and compromise.

[jfengel]

The large scale something is, the more a political party matters. At a school level you can be closely informed about all of the issues and know all of the players. You can barely do that at the level of city politics. State and federal politics simply doesn't allow it.

Large scale democracies only work when people are willing to live together. If you play democracy as a winner-take-all game, it's going to fail sooner or later.

I'm not convinced that anything works at the national scale, at least not over the long term. I suspect that the US, as one of the oldest-and-largest democracies, is demonstrating a path that others will eventually follow.

[int_19h]

The problem is that the side that organizes always wins over the side that does not. And it's very difficult to ban political organization (which is ultimately what parties are) in a way that is actually enforceable.

The American founding fathers were mostly of the opinion that political parties are bad and should be avoided if republic is to stand. Yet they found themselves organizing into parties before the ink was dry.

So the best we can do in practice is engineer the political system such that the damage from party groupthink is minimal.

[eucyclos]

This is all true, but I think the issue is upstream of where you're pointing - democracy declines when the goal becomes to win rather than to serve the constituents. Parties are a way to win and they also reinforce the idea that winning is the goal.

I'm not sure as to solutions but I don't think they're impossible - something like an inoculation of the entire political class against the memeset that prioritizes winning over serving the constituents. Then if an unofficial party tries to seize power in a system that officially disallows them, the majority is already primed to respond in an organized way.

[CrossVR]

> That's how two party systems work

Fixed that for you.

There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.

[jfengel]

It comes at the cost of locality, but that's far less important today than it had been in the past. Nobody knows their congressman anyway.

I'd really like to give PR systems a try, if for no other reason than to do a reset on the current coalitions. I fear that they will eventually settle down into a pair of coalitions very similar to the current parties, but that leaves us no worse off.

[dragonwriter]

> It comes at the cost of locality,

It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.

You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.

MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.

[int_19h]

It's not an either-or. In mixed-member proportional system, you still get a representative specifically for your district who can thus argue for its interests. But you also get some people elected on party lists so that the representation as a whole remains proportional to party vote. New Zealand is a good example of the system in practical use.

[smallmancontrov]

There it is, the both sides brigade, right on time!

No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.

[PaulHoule]

The difference is that the right wing version is

   stupid + stupid = consistent -> wins

(feels authentic to somebody even when it is completely disingenuous)

and the left wing version is

   smart + stupid = inconsistent -> loses

(feels demoralizing to the true believers, feels disingenuous to everyone else, see Kamala Harris) e.g. "woke" is really a left wing retread of right wing ideology, for instance that "defund the police" slogan cribs Reagan's "defund the left" slogan, because it is so exhausted it can only mine Thatcherism for ideas.

[gsf_emergency_6]

Paging @aeb-kun!

The craft of "rationalist cover stories" as a class of band-aids!

Remember how you failed to help "black people"? The people who make the dems what they are today seem to more than 2 steps removed from that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727418

The emotional concerns that underly this ineffective (akratic) behaviour seem to come from uh "rationalist suffering" (the modern day version of white man's burden?)

Piketty 2022 section on Educational Justice (page 1007) thinks that its because dems are the overeducated children of the "Brahmin left".

So I think you've got the right diagnosis- reps are the undereducated children of the "Merchant Right", so their rationalist* cover stories are naturally more convincing :)

*Pecuniary===rational as in the "Legitimation Crisis"

Ps: somewhat better (=less overtly social-darwinist) handwringing, but not quite a bandaid

https://archive.ph/JC8Ip