naturalplastic wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
I would have to say that we have a DE FACTO two-party system, at least as far as electing the President and most of Congress is concerned.
Nobody from any "third" party has been elected President since at least 1860 (and probably beyond then, too). It's been either Republicans, or Democrats. I'll have to research pre-1860. From about 1820-1850, as far as I can recall, it's either been Whig or Democrat.
Congress has had very few Independents through all these years. A few....but a very paltry amount, indeed.
There's more of a multi-party system in local government, though. And it does have an impact.
Ben Wattenburg did a whole show about the history of American third parties on NPR some years ago. Basically you're right. The only third partry to ever get a guy into the Oval Office was the GOP (Lincoln). And then the Whigs (the previous big party opposing what we now call the Democrats) died out, and the GOP became one of the big two.
But Wattenburg concluded that third parties have made impacts (Teddy Roosevelt with his Bullmoose party, and Ross Perot with his Independent party) because the two big parties often ignore issues that some part of the public is seething about. But then after the wake up call - one or the other of the big two parties will co-opt that issue raised by the insurgent third party into its own platform- and then the new third party will die out. And we go back to a two party system again.
Dont know if thats good or bad. Britain is like us- and tends towards a two party system. But on the mainland of Europe all of the countries have zillions of little splinter parties. The splinter parties tend to form ad hoc alliances that are sort of equivalent to our two big parties (or thats my understanding of it).
What is nice about having lots of small parties is that it becomes more likely that people will find a party that shares their values. Then the parties make coalitions where a lot of horsetrading goes on, and every party has to make a decision about which policies are most important for them and which policies the voters will punish them for not carrying out, in the next elections. It allows for a certain pragmatism, and to some extent mitigates the effect of the echo chambers produced by political parties.
The interesting thing is that some parties become irrelevant and die. In some of the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe, for example, there have been some major rising and falling among the parties, based on their performance in office. For every election, politicians step up their act and curb some of the excesses of the last term.
Also, new parties have a chance of starting small and increasing their influence. Both the modern right wing parties and the green parties are fairly new addition to the political scene, yet their influence is real.
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I sometimes leave conversations and return after a long time. I am sorry about it, but I need a lot of time to think about it when I am not sure how I feel.
23 Jun 2016, 12:41 am
