How To Keep Voters With You Forever, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Duverger's Law

[maradydd]

So I'm a bit late to the game with this trifecta of links, and maybe what I have to say has already been said elsewhere, but what the hell:

How To Keep Someone With You Forever -- a concise guide to some extremely effective techniques for stringing someone along in a shitty job or relationship by placing them into a "sick system". There's some

Comments

[mellowtigger]

I'm just now getting to your article. Too much to take in at the moment, as I'm already burned out from today's post. I think your topic is more general than mine (limited to America's fundamentally sick financial system).

edit: p.s. But your topic makes me glad that I avoided the Republocrats and voted for a marginal 3rd party candidate. :)

[jordan179]

But what I actually want to talk about is the US two-party system. I probably hear it most from LGBT quarters, but I've noticed a growing sentiment that the Democratic Party has a number of constituencies that it's perfectly happy to throw under the bus when it's convenient. But these constituencies continue to vote staunchly Democrat, because bones do get thrown from time to time, and these successes are trumpeted as reasons why it is imperative that you, the queer/black/disabled/&c voter must spend your time, your money, your social capital, to get us through THIS NEXT CRISIS!!1!

This is very true as regards the Democrats and the LGBT community, for the very good reason that some of the Democrat core constituencies are more hostile to LGBT than is the American average. I speak in particular of American blacks and Hipsanics, and even more so (though they are arguably not a "core constituency" for the Democrats) Muslims

[whswhs]

I find it noteworthy that support for the Democrats in 2008 was clearly a nonlinear function of wealth; people at the low end tended to vote Democratic, but so did people at the high end. The strongest Republican support was from people with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 per household. Do you think that large numbers of people at the high end of the economy were voting against their own interests?

[jordan179]

Do you think that large numbers of people at the high end of the economy were voting against their own interests?

Not totally, when you factor in status interests. Taxes and regulations do not (unless so high as to be utterly ruinous to the economy, as was the case in Britain post World War II) primarily hurt rich people, they primarily hurt those who are trying to BECOME rich. In other words, they reduce upward social mobility.

Also remember that in 2008 a combination of Bush's own mistakes and the united opposition of the mainstream media (save for Fox) convinced many people that Obama would be better for everyone. Obama made lots of contradictory promises. Since then, it's become evident that he didn't mean to keep most of them, and hence those he betrayed are lashing back. Hence the results of 2010.

[whswhs]

I see that we actually agree on this more closely than I initially thought. I think your take on taxes and regulations is quite right; a large part of economic regulation actually serves to enable more effective cartelization, a pattern that goes back to the Progressive era, as discussed first in Gabriel Kolko's Railroads and Regulation. A regulated society tends to be a stratified society, which the people in the upper strata may like. One of the virtues of an economy that encourages innovation is that from time to time you get new technologies and industries that raise new people to the top-and even better, destroy old industries and weaken the economic and political positions of their owners.

Ayn Rand was actually onto this, with her idea of the "aristocracy of pull." It's always struck me as odd that people focus on her heroic big businessmen, and ignore the fact that the worst villains in her novels are also big businessmen-corrupt ones who rely on favors from the government to keep them in business.

[jordan179]

Seriously, guys, we have a president who asserts that he can eavesdrop and order hits on American citizens with impunity. This is fucked. People are not flipping their shit every day about this why?

In part, because the mainstream media has convinced a lot of people that a Republican President would be worse, despite the fact that Obama has actually claimed more power than did George W. Bush, and that Obama justifies it less as a war power (and hence temporary) and more as inherent to the Executive (and hence permanent). But actually, people are "flipping their shit" about this, which is one big reason why the Democrats are down in the polls, and lost the recent election.

[xthread]

Let me get this straight - someone expects a Sitting Presiden to take actions that Reduce the power of the Executive?! Seriously?

[q_pheevr]

I tried a few of the surveys, and on the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale in particular, I scored rather higher on "ingroup/loyalty" than I might have expected. I think there may be a problem with the design of the survey here. For example, I said that I wouldn't (for any price) go on the radio and say bad things about my country1 that I didn't believe were true, and I assume this contributed to my "ingroup/loyalty" score. But I also wouldn't say bad things about another country that I didn't think were true, nor would I say good things about my own country that I didn't think were true. What seems to be most relevant in this particular scenario is that I value truthfulness (which might have something to do with fairness or maybe even purity, or which might be a distinct value in its own right).

In-group loyalty definitely has a place in my moral system-to take a couple of variations on one of the other scenarios in the survey, I'd help a friend move house for free,2 regardless of whether I thought they'd ever have occasion to

[maradydd]

I had the same problem. I'm thinking about writing to Haidt to see what he has to say about that aspect of the survey design.

[whswhs]

The survey I found most striking had me scoring above average on Openness to Experience, and below average on the other four traits. I'm not sure that's right. I make my living as a freelance copy editor; that seems to call for a fairly high level of Conscientiousness, both to do good work and to get it done on time. But perhaps I don't understand how the trait is defined.

[siliconshaman]

At this point, I can't help but think that the US and UK need a third option party, a Rational Party who's policies are based on;
1] Do no Harm [or as little as possible]
2] no ideology, go with what works most efficiently.
3] try to do the greatest good for the most amount of people, without harming minorities [see 1]

Of course, that'll never happen. So we're stuck with abusive, manipulative sick systems... and where if this was a relationship between two people the obvious course would be to leave.