The window is bifurcating. The political left and right have moved so far apart that "middle ground" ideas appeal to very few and the extremes have more viability.
Wedge issues have really split us irrationally. Group A tells scary bedtime stories to their children using caricatures of an average Group B position as a way to maintain in-group discipline.
What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If you want to stand out in the primaries, you can't be a competent, coalition-building centrist. You gotta eat more babies than the next guy.
Current political system reinforces extremism. I'm of the camp that believes we urgently need incremental reforms like Ranked Choice Voting and open primaries. It doesn't solve everything, but it's the reform we can do that gives us the most mileage today.
Although FPTP is bad, it's not at all clear that IRV (the election method that most mean when they say the ballot-marking method of RCV) actually leads to less extremism. It's a chaos monkey in any race that approaches competitive, and changes that one might expect to help A (such as more A > B > C votes) can actually hurt A. That is, its bad results show up precisely when it might produce a different outcome than FPTP. See the recent Alaska house election for an actual case.
If you're tied to a full ranking, there are much better choices than IRV; any of the Condorcet methods, for instance. However, rating systems are far more likely to produce compromise candidates. I like Approval, perhaps with a runoff between the top 2.
First time I've heard this, great point. (The baby eating thing, not ranked choice voting)
I think extremism is a sign things are bad, but haven't gotten worse. Like, normal communication has broken down, but nothing has escalated to the really scary place where everyone shuts up.
There basically is no political left to speak of and there hasn’t been one for decades. There is a bifurcation, but it’s largely a drift between a broadly rightward shift across political mainstreams on the one hand, and an increasingly contentious concept of who is allowed to exist and to what extent they can exist unperturbed.
The Left is effectively absorbed by civil liberty issues (LGBQT+, abortion, and immigration come to mind). Those issues are worthy of support but they're pathetically easy to demonize by the Right.
And there's the fact that Trump broken countless political norms so the Left is still stuck in "the old ways" and has effectively brought a knife to a gun fight.
I would say that any sense of sane immigration reform is completely unrealistic right now.
By "sane" I specifically mean "acknowledges the shortcomings of the current system, at the same time as we acknowledge our dependence on foreign labor"
peatmoss|3 years ago
What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If you want to stand out in the primaries, you can't be a competent, coalition-building centrist. You gotta eat more babies than the next guy.
Current political system reinforces extremism. I'm of the camp that believes we urgently need incremental reforms like Ranked Choice Voting and open primaries. It doesn't solve everything, but it's the reform we can do that gives us the most mileage today.
wnoise|3 years ago
If you're tied to a full ranking, there are much better choices than IRV; any of the Condorcet methods, for instance. However, rating systems are far more likely to produce compromise candidates. I like Approval, perhaps with a runoff between the top 2.
EDITTED-TO-ADD: In practice IRV and FPTP both suffer from the "center-squeeze effect": https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
sdwr|3 years ago
I think extremism is a sign things are bad, but haven't gotten worse. Like, normal communication has broken down, but nothing has escalated to the really scary place where everyone shuts up.
eyelidlessness|3 years ago
pstuart|3 years ago
The Left is effectively absorbed by civil liberty issues (LGBQT+, abortion, and immigration come to mind). Those issues are worthy of support but they're pathetically easy to demonize by the Right.
And there's the fact that Trump broken countless political norms so the Left is still stuck in "the old ways" and has effectively brought a knife to a gun fight.
1270018080|3 years ago
cstoner|3 years ago
By "sane" I specifically mean "acknowledges the shortcomings of the current system, at the same time as we acknowledge our dependence on foreign labor"