I’m reading Russell Muirhead, The Promise of Party In A Polarized Age:
In the 2008 presidential primary election in Texas, voters at one polling place routinely requested both the Republican and Democratic ballots. Many wanted to cast a ballot for both Senator John McCain in the Republican primary and Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Some were indignant and many were confused when told that they had to choose only one party’s ballot. These voters had put some thought into their choice, and they had decided to endorse a certain kind of general election — for instance, some decided they wanted a general election between McCain and Clinton. They were at a loss as to why they were prohibited from giving practical force to their choice through the vote. In a sense, they simply misunderstood what they were doing by voting in a primary election: they were participating in politics as partisans, by contributing to the “basic function of a party” — selecting its candidate for office. They simply did not see themselves acting as partisans in a partisan decision. From the start, primary elections have been shot through with confusion: on one hand, they are informed by the logic of party and partisanship — their original function, after all, was to decide which person will represent a party in a general election. On the other hand, they reflect the logic of democracy — they were intended to amplify the power of the people and to diminish the power of party elites. These two logics can only be reconciled if the people are partisan; only then can primary elections succeed at both engaging the broad electorate and at nominating a party’s candidate with integrity. Primary elections have never succeeded at this act of reconciliation.
For real? A significant number wanted to vote in both and thought that was kosher?
The source for the anecdote is: author’s own conversation with a polling worker in Travis County, Texas, March 4, 2008. Take it for what it may be worth. (Maybe polling workers like telling tall tales about confused voters at the end of a long day?)
More interesting is that the logic of wanting to vote for both is hardly illogical (as Muirhead sees.) Suppose you are organizing an academic panel on a political subject: liberalism and its critics. Or whatever. You would want some liberals and some critics as speakers. Presumably you would want some liberals and some critics organizing and doing the inviting. You would grant both sides input on invites on both sides. That is, you wouldn’t set up some cordon sanitaire so that only liberal organizers pick all the liberal speakers, only critics all the critics. You wouldn’t bother doing that – thereby depriving yourself of useful information: what critics do the liberals want to hear from; which liberals do the critics find interesting? You wouldn’t worry about what would worry us most in real, partisan politics: ratfucking. (In the book, Muirhead uses the more demure term ‘raiding’.) I’ve never heard about anyone organizing an academic panel/conference and ratfucking it: seeing to it that only stupid, unworthy, inarticulate speakers (maybe deliberate ‘plants’) for the other side get invited, so my side is more likely to ‘win’ and the other is discredited. You wouldn’t bother organizing a conference unless you wanted a good conference – a good discussion – so no one is motivated to ratfuck. (I am sure that someone can come up with an exception that proves my rule, some one time it happened. The point stands: academics make strawman arguments, like everyone else. But they don’t deliberately nominate strawmen as panelists.)
Why can’t politics be like that? Everyone should vote for the ‘best’ on both sides, in the primary, so we get the best from both, in the main event? Ergo, everyone should want to cast a vote in both the Democratic primary, for the ‘best’ Democrat. And in the Republican primary, for the ‘best’ Republican.
Deliberative democracy, anyone?
Well, obviously that wouldn’t work: because ratfucking. Strategic voting across party lines. Democrats would vote for the Republican most likely to be defeated, Republicans for the Democrat most likely to be defeated.
So what’s this post about? Like Harry, I have an ethics question. Let’s travel to an alternate universe in which the Republican primary race is currently a nail-biter between, let’s say, Kasich and Trump. Let’s suppose Mary and Ann (Harry’s two protagonists, now wandered into my possible world) believe the following: Kasich would make a less bad President than Trump. Also, Kasich would be a much stronger opponent against Hillary in the general.
Suppose it’s an open primary, i.e. our protagonists can cast primary votes across party lines if they choose. Hillary has got it locked up against Bernie (or, if you like, imagine Mary and Ann are relatively indifferent between Hillary and Bernie, but agree there’s a big difference between Kasich and Trump.) Mary says she is crossing over to vote for Kasich because she believes the US election should be a contest between the ‘best’ each party can offer. The Democrats have settled that, so she is crossing over to help out the Republicans, who are having trouble. She knows a vote for Kasich can only reduce the chance her favored candidate, Hillary, will win in the general. But she’s doing the right thing in a civic sense, voting for the ‘best’ Republican, to ensure a healthy general election contest between strong, opposed candidates – one standing for conservative, Republican values, one standing for liberal, Democratic values.
Voting for Kasich is optimal, in a civic sense. She quotes Thoreau: “All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not concerned that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority.”
Who knows? Maybe a Kasich win in the primary would result, long-term, in a healthy resurgence of Scrantonian sanity. So, even if Dems lost the White House, it would be better for the country in the long-run.
Ann says that Mary is out of her tiny little mind (and also she has misunderstood her author – but mostly she’s out of her tiny little mind.)
Not only is it suicidal to help those Republican bastards clean up their mess and, maybe, clean up in the general. (Mary freely admits President Kasich will be bad, just not as terrible as President Trump. How can you vote in a way that will significantly increase the chances that a bad President will be elected, when a better one might be elected instead – Hillary?) But, beyond that, if there’s any question of civic principle here, Mary has actually managed to be on the wrong side of it. It’s wrong to interfere with the internal politics of the Republican Party like that. It’s not her party, it’s theirs. Mary is basically proposing to force the Republicans to ‘freely’ choose the best conservative. But ratfucking in a Rousseauvian, high-minded spirit – to serve the ideal, partisan will, rather than the General Will – is still ratfucking. And ratfucking is dirty tricks. If the Republicans are out of touch with the best that conservative values could be, screw ’em. But don’t ratfuck ’em to keep them from screwing themselves – maybe all the way to the White House.
How would Mary feel if, in some possible world in which the Democratic primary is a nailbiter between Hillary and Jim Webb, and in which the Republicans settled early on Scott Walker, Republicans – rather than wasting their votes – crossed over in droves, in open primary states, to push Webb over the top because, although he’s a Dem, at least he ‘killed a man’ and has that Scots-Irish tribalism thing. Suppose Republicans did this not because Webb would be weak against Scott in the general – quite the contrary! he would split the Scots vote – but because they honestly believe the Democrats have gone astray with all this multicultural PC grievance nonsense. Liberalism used to be muscular and a friend of the white working class, like when JFK was President. Democrats themselves don’t see what they’ve lost, but Republicans can maybe help save the once-great Democratic Party from itself by getting Webb nominated in the primary. It’s the right thing to do, even if it’s a long-shot, even if it means the Republicans have more trouble winning than they might have.
How would Mary like Republicans coming into her party, forcing her to nominate Webb for her own good?
To this Mary replies: Ann, you actually prefer the Green Party. But you know in the US it’s the Democrats or the Republicans. So, every election, you yourself do this thing you say is ratfucking, now that I propose to do it. You cross party lines to pull the Dems left. If it’s alright to do that, even if it makes the Dems a bit less electable, how can it be wrong for me to cross over to pull the Republicans a bit towards healthy conservatism, even if it makes the Dems a bit less electable?
To this Ann replies that it seems worse when it involves actually crossing the left-right divide. That is, it’s more ok for a far-leftist to vote, strategically, for a moderate-leftist, to defeat a moderate rightist, than it is for a moderate leftist to vote, strategically, for a moderate rightist, to defeat a far-rightist. At least in cases in which this lessens the chances that a moderate leftist will win.
If you feel that the thought-experiment is muddled by the presence of Trump, who is not right-wing but Trump-wing – that is, in favor of all and only things that feed the glory of Trump – substitute Ted Cruz. So you have Kasich vs. Cruz, and Kasich is sincerely regarded as both a better conservative (less crazy, also more honest) and as a stronger opponent for Hillary.
Muirhead’s book, by the by, is pretty good, although I’m not done. His line, so far as I get it so far is: loyalty. “The indispensable service parties and partisanship render concerns the moment of aggregation, which deliberation cannot do without and which parties supply. Put differently, deliberative democracy needs elections, and elections need parties and partisans to make them happen.” And partisanship requires virtues of loyalty. It’s more complicated and, like I said, I’m not done.
Oh, and Muirhead has a case that matches Harry’s specifications, more or less:
On the eve of the February 2012 Republican primary in Michigan, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum paid for automated telephone calls to registered Democrats, urging them to vote for him against Mitt Romney (implicitly acknowledging that Democrats would view Santorum as the weaker general election opponent for President Obama). Romney castigated the tactic as “outrageous and disgusting” and “a terrible dirty trick.” As Romney explained, “Look, we don’t want Democrats deciding who our nominee is going to be, we want Republicans deciding who our nominee is going to be.” But it was soon revealed that Romney himself raided Democratic primaries when it was convenient. In the Massachusetts Democratic primary of 1992, Romney voted for Democratic candidate Paul Tsongas. Romney was registered as an independent at the time, but his sympathies were plainly oriented to the Republican Party. As he explained at the time, “When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican.” Perhaps his sense that Santorum was pulling a dirty trick was based in his sense that Santorum, as a Republican, should not want the Republican Party to nominate the weaker candidate — at least Romney could say that he always voted in what he took to be the best interest of the Republican Party, something that Santorum in his appeal to Democrats could not quite avow. But Romney’s objection was not this nuanced. Rather, he objected to the very thing he had done: partisans participating in the primary election of the party they opposed, with the intention of favoring the weaker candidate.
{ 54 comments }
Lord 04.24.16 at 5:24 am
Consider living in a district dominated by the opposing party. The election is a farce; all the action is at the primary level. Do you believe in pointless exercises or try to elect the least bad alternative before the farce?
Dub 04.24.16 at 6:40 am
I was a poll worker for for the primaries in 2008 (in New Mexico). I would say around 1 in 50 wanted to vote in both primaries, and would get extremely pissed when they couldn’t. Many more than 1/50 did not seem to understand that they weren’t actually electing anyone to office that day.
Z 04.24.16 at 8:18 am
Who knows? Maybe a Kasich win in the primary would result, long-term, in a healthy resurgence of Strantonian sanity.
I think here lies a crucial detail: in first approximation, it seems to me that the brand and style of politics defended by the primary winner gets reinforced only if the primary winner then goes on to win. Otherwise, it might in fact get damaged.
So if the alternatives ranked in decreasing order both of subjective probability and desirability are 1) H. wins against T. 2) H. wins against K. 3) K. wins against H. and 4) T. wins against H. (as I think there are in the real world), then it would seem counterproductive to vote for K. in the primary from the perspective of a H. supporter, as not only do you diminish the probability of a H. win, you also bolster the probability of a K. lost with T. and T. supporters playing the “I-told-you-so” card (in the real world, one would have to add to the fact that a K. nomination would have been through a machination during the convention, making it nay impossible to imagine that T. supporters would come out thinking anything else that “we made the right choice and they stole T.’s victory”).
If however, you are in Lord’s scenario, then things are different.
In either case, I don’t see the ethical dilemma. Presumably there is an ethical duty to try to follow the spirit of a law (or rule) and not the letter, so that even if this is technically permissible then one should maybe not vote to both primaries if that is against the spirit of the procedure. But in an era of disintegrating political forces (with all the accompanying dysfunctional aspects), is it still against the spirit? After all, again in the real world, there is probably a non-trivial percentage of the american public whose ranking of candidates is 1) Trump 2) Sanders etc…
John Holbo 04.24.16 at 9:28 am
“What about the ethics of non-voting?”
By the same token ‘maybe he doesn’t eat hay’ is a sort of a solution to the dilemma facing Buridan’s Ass. Sort of.
Collin Street 04.24.16 at 10:18 am
See, the US government shouldn’t be involved in running primary elections. They’re a party-internal process, and so should be run in accordance with party-internal determinations.
It’s not the role of the state to select who’ll be the candidates. The state’s responsibility and duties begin with the candidates that present themselves, not before. Otherwise it’s blurring the lines between party and state.
David 04.24.16 at 10:26 am
It all depends on what you think voting means and what the purpose of it is.
I wonder if you know David Van Reybrouck’s new book “Against Elections”, written originally in Flemish, and translated into French but not yet, so far as I can see, into English. Van Reybrouck (author of a prize-winning history of the Congo) argues essentially for the end of political parties and a return to the Athenian system of assemblies made up of delegates chosen by lot. That may be a step too far for some, but he effectively diagnoses the inadequacy of the current party system, and the inability for people to actually influence anything directly. (Indeed, representative party politics was originally designed precisely to keep power out of the hands of ordinary people).
So if you decide that the system is inherently unfair, the question becomes how, as citizens, we combine to manipulate the system to get what we want from it, ignoring, if necessary, traditionally-accepted rules and precedents. Tactical voting is then not so much acceptable as mandatory.
There are two options. One, the very common tendency to view politics as a kind of sports competition, where what matters is the color of the shirt worn by the winner. Any kind of tactical voting is acceptable if “your” candidate wins. Indeed, that’s the classic premise of liberal politics: people exert their democratic right once, to vote for the team they support, and after that they shut up and let the elected professionals get on with it.
Another option is to see elections as an imperfect method of achieving (or preventing) change of one kind or another. Your question is then not “which team do I want to win?” but rather “what effect do I want to achieve?”
There are two basic alternatives: (1) The maximum influence in the existing system for groups and individuals with whom I sympathize, or who I think may do good and (2) The end of the system and its replacement by a potentially better one. A lot of the confusion in the current debate about the US elections seems to me to derive from the fact that quite a lot of people who think they want (2) when actually they are frightened of what might then happen and will settle for (1) – taking control of extra deckchairs on the Titanic.
If you believe that the political system of your country is salvageable, then you will vote tactically in the normal sense of that term, to ensure that groups you support gain more deckchairs, so that the ship can be turned around. If you think the system of your country is not salvageable, then you will vote “strategically” for the outcome most likely to destroy the existing system. (Abstention can be a valuable option). In the US case, the strategic aim would therefore be a Trump presidency, but exactly how you vote and for whom, tactically, would vary from place to place. Something similar is going on in France, where people on the Left are talking (tactically) of voting for Le Pen in the first round of the 2017 elections, as a way of keeping Sarkozy (or some other LR politobot) out of the second. But people are also reflecting that, in a contest between Hollande and Le Pen, Le Pen might well win. And because the FN is highly unlikely to be able to form a government with a majority in parliament, the likely result is the end of the French political system as we know it, and its replacement by something else, perhaps better, perhaps not. That, in my view, is what “tactical” voting is really about, rather than just ensuring that your team wins.
Paul 04.24.16 at 10:54 am
I think John’s analagy to academic debate is misleading for another reason. It might (up to a point) be more fun to debate a smart libertarian than a moderate conservative. But in an election, if I (as someone to the left of centre) am going to vote in the primary of a right-wing party, I’m going to vote for the most moderate candidate, who I disagree with less strongly, even if they’re so boring they’d put everyone to sleep if I invited them to a seminar. Even if there are few centrists in the electorate, crossover voting would produce two centrist candidates, and the aggregation would preclude any real choice thereafter. If you believe in parties as the only possible vehicle for delivering democratic change, you should always vote in your own party’s primary.
John Holbo 04.24.16 at 11:03 am
“I think John’s analagy to academic debate is misleading for another reason.”
Just to be clear: it was supposed to be, at least presumptively, a disanalogy. That is, its pretty clear that political partisanship is not quite like academic debate. Then again, it’s not quite clear how the disanalogy goes.
David 04.24.16 at 11:10 am
Ze K @9. Yes, I didn’t mean to imply that Left votes for Le Pen would “only” be tactical, since much of the FN’s support comes from former voters for left-wing parties, who have switched allegiances for the reasons you describe. Mostly this trend has been among the lower and lower-middle class sections of the electorate, but it will be interesting to see whether at the next election any of the traditional middle-class professional vote of the Left makes the jump as well. In any event, though, there will also be purely tactical voters who will vote FN in the first round but not necessarily in the second.
Soullite 04.24.16 at 11:19 am
What about the ethics of bullying people into voting the way you want them to vote using dishonest arguments?
Because in my experience, that’s what just about 100% of these ‘strategic voting’ arguments end up devolving to: ‘you’re an evil ideologue for not supporting a candidate who does the things that I, but not you, want them to do’.
Rich Puchalsky 04.24.16 at 11:24 am
One more time. A lot of the discussions about voting / strategic voting / ethics thereof confuse situations in which decisions are important (i.e. when Santorum’s campaign paid for robocalls, that could have influenced a large number of votes) with those in which decisions are not important. This is a bad intuition pump because it plays into the natural desire of people to think that their individual decisions are important and thus misrepresents the essential ethics of the situation.
I won’t also link to my even-more-often-self-linked pieces on Occupy, but people should keep in mind that deliberation is work. Representative democracy isn’t just there to disempower the people: in part it’s there because most people don’t want to do that work. Rather than force them to, I think that a more anarchist society should go in the direction of making fewer things require deliberation.
James Lynn 04.24.16 at 11:46 am
Surely Ann has a much better counterargument to Mary than the one that you have given her. Ann may support the Green Party in the sense of prefering their policies, but she supports the Democrats in the sense that she reliably votes for them. That’s an important way to support a political party, and it means that she is ‘entitled’ to vote in their primary. Whereas there is no sense in which Mary supports the Republicans.
William Timberman 04.24.16 at 11:56 am
A society in which fewer things require deliberation would seem to depend upon a ready supply of manager-mandarins who are not only competent, but honest and public spirited as well. Which is what monarchists, communists, neoliberals, and pretty much everyone else except fascists have historically been better at promising than delivering. (Fascists don’t bother promising anyone anything except a sort of reflected glory.)
My question for Rich is this: if we can’t manage to teach civics, let alone science, to our children, where are these wonder-wonks going to come from? Will we hatch them from a clutch of anarchist eggs? And who is going to lay these eggs, I wonder?
Rich Puchalsky 04.24.16 at 12:03 pm
“A society in which fewer things require deliberation would seem to depend upon a ready supply of manager-mandarins”
No, not really. Just fewer large-scale coordination problems.
Z 04.24.16 at 12:21 pm
in latest polls, Le Pen beats everyone except Juppe
In the first round. In the second round, everybody defeats Le Pen except possibly Hollande (but I think even that is an artifact of early polling). But I agree with you that Hollande doesn’t seem to be a contender.
Tying this to the OP, many left of center French are apparently considering taking part in the rightwing party primary in order to help select the less repulsive candidate (from their point of view).
John Holbo 04.24.16 at 12:28 pm
“This is a bad intuition pump because it plays into the natural desire of people to think that their individual decisions are important”
How so? I mean: how does it play into this desire? Just because it discusses individual voting?
William Timberman 04.24.16 at 12:41 pm
Rich Puchalsky @ 18
So…a self-regulating technology which is much less material-intensive than what we have now? AI, robots, etc.? Brautigan’s machines of loving grace? iPhones appear to be a great advance over steam locomotives in terms of efficient use of materials, but only if the server farms that make them possible are removed from our calculations.
Or are we talking some sort of post-industrial, back-to-the-village decentralization — solar panels on everyone’s roof, a pacific citizenry growing their own carrots and herding their own sheep on an allotment in the commons?
To be less flippant about it, or rather less despairing of current trends, what kind of human evolution is required to create such a well-adjusted, well-ordered society, and what signs of it in embryonic form should we look for? There are plenty of theories to read, and many earnest experiments to observe, but I haven’t yet encountered any that scale much beyond the intentional communities of the past. Portland, Oregon may be comforting to those who’ve managed to settle there, but it isn’t much of a model for saving a planet with 7.5 billion people still blissfully gnawing away at it.
John Holbo 04.24.16 at 12:44 pm
“That’s an important way to support a political party, and it means that she is ‘entitled’ to vote in their primary. Whereas there is no sense in which Mary supports the Republicans.”
Good point. But what if Mary consistently decides to do this? Election after election she decides the Dems are all pretty much the same, and better than the Repubs, but the Repubs are always offering a wide-range of candidates from the bad (Kasich) to the atrocious (Trump). So she always finds herself voting, in the primary, for the merely bad Republican? She is consistently a Repub primary voter but not a loyal one?
You could point out, of course, that Mary always votes Dem in the general. But she isn’t a ratfucker. She genuinely does wish the Republicans the best candidate, by their lights, according to her lights. And sometimes she votes in ways that may make them stronger in the general, against her own interests.
David 04.24.16 at 1:39 pm
“A tactical vote for Le Pen in the first round doesn’t seem logical”.
Well, if you begin from the fact that there are only two places in the second round, then if you are a convinced Socialist supporter (there are still a couple I believe) you want the candidate of the Left to have the weakest opposition in the second round. This means that if Hollande (let’s say it’s him) looks as though he will get into the second round anyway, his precise score in the first round doesn’t matter that much – he only needs to come second. After that, the issue is who his opponent will be. Voting for Le Pen, by this argument, means that Hollande’s likely challenger will be the person most likely to unite the centre and left against her, and encourage the right to abstain. Whereas Hollande would almost certainly lose to Juppé and Bayrou, and probably to Sarkozy (if the latter’s not in prison) the assumption is that Le Pen would be relatively easier to beat. I’m not sure I necessarily accept this argument (I think Le Pen stands a 50% chance of winning anyway) and of course tactical voting has the possibility of going horribly wrong – a point we should perhaps discuss.
But relating this to the OP again, such maneuvers seem to me entirely reasonable if you accept my earlier argument. If we agree that elections are, at best, a very poor way of giving expression to popular views, and at worst a complete con-trick, then the citizen and voter has every right to act in as devious a fashion as they want. If the game is rigged, I don’t see a moral problem here.
SusanC 04.24.16 at 1:44 pm
Maybe John’s conferences are beter behaved than those i’m used to… I suspect sometimes panellists are invited for the entertainment value of having the audience explain why the speaker is wrong headed.
“Truly, a theory is charming not least because it is refutabke; this is what attracts the better minds to it,”-N.
James Lynn 04.24.16 at 1:53 pm
John Holbo @23
If it’s a ratfuck to vote in the Republican primary, knowing that you’re going to vote Democrat in the general, then it must remain a ratfuck however often you do it. So I withdraw the word reliably from my previous post, because I don’t think that helps. But note that this is Ann’s argument and not mine: I’m not sure that I agree with her.
LFC 04.24.16 at 2:04 pm
Collin Street @7
the US government shouldn’t be involved in running primary elections
It isn’t.
Scott P. 04.24.16 at 2:12 pm
“and of course tactical voting has the possibility of going horribly wrong – a point we should perhaps discuss.”
Very important. Not only does this approach require a sense of the political winds that, should one possess it, would allow you to replace Nate Silver and make a pretty penny, it also assumes that a universe in which Hollande gets 6 million Socialist votes and Le Pen receives 2 million FN votes is identical to a universe in which Le Pen gets 2 million FN votes and 2 million Socialist votes and Hollande gets 4 million Socialist votes, which strikes me as inherently unlikely.
LFC 04.24.16 at 2:21 pm
The real issue here, or so it seems (and I cd be wrong), is one’s attitude to partisanship. If you think, like Muirhead or Nancy Rosenblum (not that I’ve read either one’s book on the topic), that partisanship is a Good Thing, you’re going to oppose Dems voting in Rep primaries and vice-versa, period. If you don’t care much about partisanship or don’t think it’s important, then cross-over voting is not going to bother you that much.
Muirhead as quoted by Holbo says “elections need parties and partisans to make them happen.” In the abstract, I’m not sure. Perhaps there could be an election without parties or more precisely a (democratic) electoral system without a party system — at least in theory; I’m not sure if, at least in the modern era, there’s been one in practice. Or, more realistically perhaps, parties might not have to be as central to an electoral system as they usually are. I don’t know the pol-sci lit. on this.
Btw, typo in the OP: “Strantonian” should be Scrantonian.
David 04.24.16 at 2:55 pm
@Ze K
No, you’re not missing anything, I think. As I said, I’m not sure I buy this argument myself. But those who put it forward make two assumptions. (1) that Hollande is solidly guaranteed a position in the second round, by being first or second placed in the polls, with a clear margin of safety, and (2) that Le Pen has a good enough chance of being the other candidate, and a relatively small tactical vote from the Left can make that into a certainty. Whether this combination of circumstances will actually apply, no-one has any idea. It’s true Hollande is having a miserable time in the polls at the moment, but that will probably improve a bit with the imminence of the election, and a series of deals on the Left, that wants at all costs to avoid a repeat of the traumatic elimination of Jospin in the first round in 2002. Of course if Hollande really looks like being knocked out, then voting for Le Pen would make no sense (unless of course you have already discounted Hollande, and vote Le Pen to crash to system, as I was suggesting earlier. ) There are certainly habitual supporters of the Left who are so disgusted that they would actually vote to crash the system and start again. It comes down to my earlier distinction between politics as a sports competition and politics in terms of objectives.
Phil 04.24.16 at 3:53 pm
If a primary is open – i.e. you don’t have to join the party or register as a supporter in order to cast a vote – then surely it should be possible to vote in more than one. After all, I might genuinely support (say) the least right-wing Republican candidate and the least left-wing Democrat; I might have genuine difficulty deciding between the two & be happy for either of them to win the eventual contest, happier than I would be to see either a right-wing Republican or a left-wing Democrat winning.
Rich Puchalsky 04.24.16 at 4:59 pm
JH: “How so? I mean: how does it play into this desire? Just because it discusses individual voting?”
It makes people think that their strategic voting (or whatever) is a kind of raiding operation writ small. But it isn’t.
I’ll use an example. Drinking alcohol kills brain cells. Even so, most societies pretty much tolerate it or encourage it convivially. If there were another drug that killed 5% of your brain cells with each use, it would not merely be a much stronger form of the same thing. It would be a wholly different kind of thing, a different ethical question. Not everything can be discussed as if it is the same when you reductionistically break it down into smaller and smaller pieces that seem to work in the same way (killing brain cells, in this case).
So let’s say you wanted to talk about the drug that killed 5% of your brain cells with each use. You could say “This is just a stronger form of alcohol, and we tolerate alcohol.” That is a bad intuition pump. Or you could start with the drug that killed 5% of your brain cells with each use and say “Alcohol works like this, so we should ban alcohol.” Also a bad intuition pump.
Saying that people’s individual voting is ethically similar to large-scale campaign operations is doing just that.
Rich Puchalsky 04.24.16 at 5:14 pm
WT: “So…a self-regulating technology which is much less material-intensive than what we have now? […] Or are we talking some sort of post-industrial, back-to-the-village decentralization”
Neither. I don’t want to take over the thread: maybe I’ll find the energy to write a blog post or something. But consider what the major democratic decisions are about:
War: well, the society wouldn’t have the capability to wage aggressive war
Redistribution: no property rights beyond personal property and use of property you’re doing something with, so…
Laws: no laws, except some kind of enforced rules against violence
So is there a lot to communally decide? People seem to think that high productivity isn’t possible without the profit motive and enforced hierarchy, but I disagree. I think that social status seeking and voluntary hierarchy could be plug-in replacements that would work well enough.
Yankee 04.24.16 at 5:30 pm
William Timberman #22: what kind of human evolution is required to create such a well-adjusted, well-ordered society
Obviously, a move towards toleration of the other and acceptance of decisions that are made socially, even at personal cost. A sense of self larger than the individual, less defined by what it opposes than the tribe.
That academics, who are as grandiose, jealous, and spiteful as any normal human, have been able to construct an environment that constrains them to act (more or less) “as if” being more nearly right were more important than being the princess at the ball, gives hope.
Ed 04.24.16 at 5:35 pm
California adopted the system recently where every candidate runs in the same “primary”, then the top two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. Louisiana has used that same system.
This is really a single member majoritarian system, and not too different from that used in France for its legislative elections. However, its use in the US points to the essential confusion Americans have about political parties. In most of the world, parties exist to get candidates elected and, hopefully, advance some sort of policy agenda. A candidate running with a party label is just running with a sort of label attached that allows voters to get some idea of what the candidate will do while in office. In the United States, parties have wound up existing to organize the first round of voting in what is in effect a two round election system. Its no wonder voters are confused and US party politics are devoid of policy content. Note that proportional representation systems, where parties are usually directly written into how elections are organized, parties can often cynically add or drop policies as much as the Democrats and Republicans.
The logic of the system in Louisiana and California points to either a non-party or a multi-party system, but voters stick with the Democrats and Republicans out of force of habit and conditioning. Also worth mentioning is the system used in Washington, with a single primary where all candidates run, but the top vote getting Democrat and top vote getting Republican always advances. Voters can only vote for one candidate in this “jungle primary”, but you could fix things to allow them to cast one vote each for up to two candidates. But there is no problem in this system with Democrats effectively selecting the Republican candidate and vice versa.
Of note is that electoral and policy outcomes in California, Louisiana, Washington, or for that matter Nebraska with its non-partisan elections don’t differ in obvious ways from those in other states.
Sebastian H 04.24.16 at 6:41 pm
“and of course tactical voting has the possibility of going horribly wrong ”
This part is always assumed out of the hypotheticals but it seems to me the most important point.
If ratfucking to get Trump as the nominee increases Clinton’s chances of winning by say a very generous 6% you still have increased Trump’s chances of being President by a huge amount. Political runs end up turning on a lot of little chance things. Maybe Clinton will make a particularly bad gaffe on something. Maybe a terrorist attack scares people. Maybe a heart attack kills her. Maybe a stroke leaves her unable to speak clearly. Maybe a crazy person attacks Trump, kills his wife and some misplaced sympathy vote sweeps him to office. Bad things happen and ratfucking makes the downsides a lot worse. The ethics of that situation seem to suggest that if you are voting in the other side’s primaries you need to vote for the actually most palatable-to-you candidate.
“The point stands: academics make strawman arguments, like everyone else. But they don’t deliberately nominate strawmen as panelists.” My experience is very thin (and this may turn on “conference” rather than “panel”. But at UCSD the entirety of the freshman class at my college was put in a “Dimensions of Culture” class in which hot political topics were theoretically debated, though always presented by left, lefty and leftier professors. They invited a panel on abortion which consisted of a speaker from NOW and a speaker from NARAL with the balance to be given by “The Silent Scream” which if you’ve seen it is the hokiest of hokey transparent propaganda films. I also attended a panel on affirmative action where the panelists were from the NAACP and an actual oily member of the Klan. I’m pretty sure the organizer wasn’t attempting to get a credible anti-affirmative action voice in front of people.
William Timberman 04.24.16 at 7:33 pm
Rich Puchalsky @ 34
I wasn’t deliberately straw-manning your argument, although in retrospect it may have sounded like it. I do find it frustrating, though, whenever we go on for hours about where we ought to wind up, with a bare five minutes or so of hand-waving left at the end for questions about how we might actually go about getting there from here. There are a few leftists and anarchists — Erik Olin Wright, for example — who labor mightily to imagine the actual steps we’d have to take, but much as I appreciate their efforts, I don’t find them persuasive, not in light of the various forms of looniness and inertia I’ve experienced in my own adventures with collective decision making. I guess I just can’t imagine a society that works without hierarchies, authorities, and concentrations of power. I remain open to thinking about new ways of legitimizing what we seemingly can’t do without, but I’m also well aware that if history teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that legitimacy is a perishable good. Maybe Brecht (and Yankee @ 36) have the right idea — to get where we want to go, we may just have to dissolve the present body politic and elect another — one much closer to the angels than the apes we still resemble far more than we’d like to admit.
One final note: Yes, this was way, way off-topic. My fault entirely, and I apologize.
LFC 04.24.16 at 7:40 pm
Ed @37
In most of the world, parties exist to get candidates elected and, hopefully, advance some sort of policy agenda. A candidate running with a party label is just running with a sort of label attached that allows voters to get some idea of what the candidate will do while in office. In the United States, parties have wound up existing to organize the first round of voting in what is in effect a two round election system. Its no wonder voters are confused and US party politics are devoid of policy content.
While US parties are not as programmatically or ideologically homogeneous as parties in a multi-party system often tend to be, it is a considerable exaggeration to say that “US party politics are devoid of policy content.” As is widely acknowledged, the Dems and Reps are *more* ideologically homogeneous than they were, say, 50 or 60 years ago, when both parties had somewhat distinct and identifiable ‘wings’. The liberal wing of the Republican party no longer exists, and neither really does the Southern conservative wing of the Dems (though there is a ‘blue dog’ caucus and a few Southern conservative Dems left in Congress — not many). There are still different strains within the parties of course, but not at all to the same extent as in the Dem and Rep parties of, say, the Eisenhower years.
LFC 04.24.16 at 7:43 pm
p.s. Or the entire first half (or even two-thirds) of the C20th.
Brett Dunbar 04.24.16 at 7:45 pm
Voting genuinely matters. You can tell this from the way that politicians cater to the interests of those parts of the electorate who vote, pensioners for example. And largely ignore those who don’t vote, the unemployed and young for example. This is not what you would expect if elections were a sham.
John Holbo 04.24.16 at 10:38 pm
“Saying that people’s individual voting is ethically similar to large-scale campaign operations is doing just that.”
Ah, it turns out you misunderstood the point of the post. Rich. Perhaps that’s my fault. The point wasn’t to say or imply that there’s no qualitative difference between strategic voting, individually, and large-scale ratfucking campaigns. It’s obvious that grain of sand/heap issues arise here. (Sorry if I didn’t mention it, but you can’t mention everything you think is tolerably obvious. That would waste time.)
The point of the post is to ask something like this: is partisanship a bug or a feature? That is, is partisan loyalty something the system has to deal with, best it can. Unfortunate, inevitable source of bias – dead weight drag on deliberative ideals. Or is it more like a swinging weight that actually sets the machine in motion, and without which it really couldn’t operate? Political life isn’t a seminar, after all. It’s a mechanism for deciding, not arguing.
Or is partisanship both? a source of bias AND an essential component of the electoral mechanism? Ergo, you can’t really idealize it away. I expect you find that a dull question. That’s fine.
Rich Puchalsky 04.24.16 at 11:06 pm
JH: “Ah, it turns out you misunderstood the point of the post. Rich.”
Did I? I said that a bad intuition pump was being used. Some quotes:
“Well, obviously that wouldn’t work: because ratfucking. Strategic voting across party lines. ”
Rafucking is not strategic voting across party lines. Heap, sand.
“And ratfucking is dirty tricks.”
Dirty tricks for a campaign, but what does that mean for an individual? Intuition pump running here as I described above.
“How can you vote in a way that will significantly increase the chances that a bad President will be elected […]”
You can’t. You can’t vote in any way that will significantly increase the chance of anything. This is not an individual ethical problem. If you didn’t mean it to be in some sense about ethics, wrong title.
John Holbo 04.24.16 at 11:19 pm
Rich, I am sorry that you misunderstood the post. I take some responsibility for that. The title was a reference to Harry’s post. I would have thought the tenor and tendency of the post – i.e. to suggest that there really isn’t an answer to these conundra at the individual voter level – is quite consistent with the (obvious) thought that this isn’t an individual ethics problem. My use of ‘ratfucking’ was also somewhat loose. But I submit that ‘ratfucking’ is not a technical term with either a clear or a narrow denotation. The effect of someone saying ‘cross party voting is ratfucking’ would be to express disapproval of the practice, in principle, not to make some complicated, necessarily implausible claim about likely effects, based on an obvious fallacy about aggregation.
In short, the post requires a input of common sense from the reader. But I think it is reasonable – if somewhat optimistic – to expect readers indeed to bring their private stock of common sense to bear on these matters.
Dean C. Rowan 04.24.16 at 11:30 pm
From a recent Pew study…
http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public
“The majority do not have uniformly conservative or liberal views. Most do not see either party as a threat to the nation. And more believe their representatives in government should meet halfway to resolve contentious disputes rather than hold out for more of what they want.
“Yet many of those in the center remain on the edges of the political playing field, relatively distant and disengaged, while the most ideologically oriented and politically rancorous Americans make their voices heard through greater participation in every stage of the political process.”
So in a way, this isn’t a Sorites issue. “Politically rancorous” individual voters are perhaps of a kind with large-scale ratfuckers. (Thank you, by the way, for affording me another opportunity to write “Sorites” and a first to write “ratfuckers.”)
If I’m reading this report correctly, in 1994 fewer than 10% of Democratic voters were consistently so, and ten years ago the same went for only 10% of Republicans. Does this answer negatively the question about whether or not hyper-partisanship is an essential feature?
Dean C. Rowan 04.24.16 at 11:35 pm
I recognize the cause-effect question here, too. Individual voters grow rancorous in part because ratfuckers succeed.
js. 04.25.16 at 2:48 am
People keep talking about Sorites (across several threads), but this strikes me as much more an instance of the free rider problem (sort of obviously, no?). Anyway, I’d just note that this sort of thing would be much less of an issue if we had a parliamentary form of government—which I think is an argument for a parliamentary form of government.
ZM 04.25.16 at 5:04 am
John Holbo,
“My use of ‘ratfucking’ was also somewhat loose. But I submit that ‘ratfucking’ is not a technical term with either a clear or a narrow denotation. The effect of someone saying ‘cross party voting is ratfucking’ would be to express disapproval of the practice, in principle, not to make some complicated, necessarily implausible claim about likely effects, based on an obvious fallacy about aggregation.”
We had a great controversy in Australia when the Prime Minister Rudd here called the Chinese governments rat fuckers during the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. I had never heard of this colloquialism before then, but once it got reported by the press the Chinese government was very unhappy about it indeed, and everyone in Australia had to learn this colloquialism.
As I argued on other posts I think it is clear you shouldn’t sabotage the nomination process of the party you don’t want to win.
The idea in the OP that people want to vote for the best candidate in each party so as to have two good presidential candidates and a good presidential competition for election , is not too bad i suppose.
This is a bit like they want to have control over the nomination process generally. Like America will have 5 candidates for President, and everyone in America can have input into who the 5 candidates are, and then you have the Presidential elections and everyone can vote for which one of the 5 candidates they think is best.
America would have to make some changes to how the nominations process proceeds to make it like a general open nomination process, instead of Primaries conducted by the two major parties. There would have to be widespread consultation, and then this can clear up the issue of when the President can and cannot appoint judges to the Supreme Court.
I think you would have to strongly discourage people from sabotaging the nomination process of the party you don’t want to win, with lots of advertisements saying how this is very wrong. I don’t however recommend the advertisements use the term rat fucking due to the controversy caused when the term was first used in mainstream Australian discourse.
But it is perfectly proper for people to wish to vote for the best nominees for President generally, and in fact this is even more proper than people just voting in party primaries of the party they belong to, since in the first case the people are voting for the best nominees for President of America generally without their judgement being distorted by wanting their party to win.
MilitantlyAardvark 04.25.16 at 7:34 am
If Hollande isn’t a contender, perhaps this time he and Juppe should agree to go Dutch…
@David @8
Does Van Reybrouck deal with the argument that genuine/radical/Athenian democracy does not scale up to the level of nation states with millions of citizens?
David 04.25.16 at 9:13 am
@50. Van Reybrouck is not suggesting, so far as I can see, the full-on Athenian option of mass votes by citizens after public debates – that wouldn’t scale at all, as you rightly say. What he’s suggesting (though tentatively) is what he calls a “bi-representative” system, in which one part of parliament (the lower house, probably) would be elected in some form (not necessarily quite as present, depending on the country) and the other selected by lottery (“sortition” is the word used by theorists of this idea). This would be accompanied by widespread devolution of powers such that individuals would have more direct influence on decisions. It would also be accompanied by new institutions, like a “Rules Council” that would oversee the activities of government itself, also selected by lot. There is (to me at least) a surprisingly large literature on these ideas, including from the Anglo-Saxon world. That said, Van Reybrouk is writing in a European context, where there are many more parties, proportional representation is common, election funding is strictly controlled, and party discipline is much looser. he doesn’t really discuss the US, and I’m not sure how far such ideas would be feasible there anyway.
SusanC 04.25.16 at 9:39 am
R. This happenung in philosopy: PlaTo’s dialogues. You want to rig it so that Socrates wins, so you invite Thracymachus on to the panel…
John Holbo 04.25.16 at 10:37 am
“You want to rig it so that Socrates wins, so you invite Thracymachus on to the panel…”
There is certainly something to the notion that Plato might have been attempting the gerrymander the Realm of Being, as it were.
On the subject of Ratfucking. Turns out: it’s a forthcoming book!
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/gops-house-seats-are-safe-heres-why.html
http://www.amazon.com/Ratf-ked-Behind-Americas-Democracy/dp/1631491628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1461580634&sr=8-1&keywords=ratfucked
reason 04.25.16 at 1:20 pm
The real problem is the two party system.
Rich Puchalsky 04.25.16 at 2:49 pm
JH: “I would have thought the tenor and tendency of the post – i.e. to suggest that there really isn’t an answer to these conundra at the individual voter level – is quite consistent with the (obvious) thought that this isn’t an individual ethics problem. ”
“Bad intuition pump” is basically a criticism of rhetoric. Whatever the conclusion of the post, you use the rhetorical device of individual ethics as a rhetorical trope throughout: Mary talking to Ann about what is ethical for the two of them to do. You can’t really continue Harry’s rhetorical device of Mary talking to Ann and still have “The indispensable service parties and partisanship render concerns the moment of aggregation, which deliberation cannot do without and which parties supply” really mean anything, because the whole post is about aggregation. Or rather, you can — you can do anything — but the thought experiment is systematically muddled.
ZM 04.25.16 at 2:52 pm
reason,
I think our systems drift to being two party systems – with occasional minor parties and independents – due to the government/opposition structure.
I think this is an okay structure since if you are going to debate a bill, you may as well have some people who are supposed to be in favour of the bill, and some people who are supposed to be against the bill, then after the debate you have a vote.
If you didn’t want the system to drift to a 2 party system, you would have to make government and opposition chosen not by parties. So it is more like sports where the two captains pick people for government and opposition from whatever party they like, but you can’t have the government pick all the good people or you won’t have a good enough opposition.
But I don’t think this would work very well, since there is already enough grumbling in the parties to keep everyone voting together, so if you let the captain of the government pick people from all sides of politics to be in the government side, how would they ever be agreeable to all vote for the bill and agreeable to only make arguments in favour of the bill?
I am not sure what happens in other countries, if there are structures that encourage multi party systems?
David 04.25.16 at 3:51 pm
Most other countries have multi-party systems, but whether they actually bring more stability depends on the voting system. In PR systems, coalitions are virtually guaranteed, so there’s a tendency for politics to be less blindly adversarial and bipolar. On the other hand, especially if you have lots of parties and a low threshold for entry to parliament, forming a government can be massively complicated. Where you have more than two parties but a non-PR system, as in the UK or France, almost any result is possible, and it won’t necessarily correspond to what the voters collectively said they wanted. In addition, the other thing that counts enormously is money. In Europe there are strict and low limits on campaign financing, which means that parties are cheap to organise and run, so there can be more of them. And in France (I’m not sure if it’s true elsewhere) the law guarantees each Presidential candidate equal TV coverage.
But this does’t dispose of the issues discussed in the OP. In Britain, the question for nearly a century has been “Do I vote for the Liberals (now Liberal Democrats) whom I prefer most, if the result is that the party I detest most then wins?” This happened catastrophically in 1983, when the Liberal vote went up, the Labour vote went down, and the Conservatives were crushingly re-elected with scarcely 40% of the popular vote. In France, where there are two rounds, it’s worse. The ten per cent of the population that supports parties to the left of the Socialists goes through existential agonies in the first round trying to decide whether to vote for the party they actually support, even if this means that the Right wins. The problem is the existence of parties at all, although, other things being equal, when parties are weak the dilemma is less painful.
CharleyCarp 04.25.16 at 5:15 pm
There would have to be widespread consultation, and then this can clear up the issue of when the President can and cannot appoint judges to the Supreme Court.
There’s no lack of clarity at all. Pres. Obama can make nominations to the judiciary until noon on Jan 20, 2017. He can make recess appointments during any recesses until then.
In our system, having 5 nominees would be madness, unless one wanted the House of Representatives to routinely pick Presidents.
John Holbo 04.25.16 at 9:56 pm
“You can’t really continue Harry’s rhetorical device of Mary talking to Ann and still have “The indispensable service parties and partisanship render concerns the moment of aggregation, which deliberation cannot do without and which parties supply†really mean anything, because the whole post is about aggregation.”
I have no idea what this means, so I can’t really respond, Rich.
John Holbo 04.26.16 at 11:07 am
Turns out that Nate Silver is Mary. He voted for Kasich in a Manhattan district in which there are 1) very few Republicans and 2) Kasich won by 70 votes.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/elections-podcast-kasich-and-cruz-are-scheming/
Skip to minute 41 of the podcast.
Robespierre 04.27.16 at 7:38 am
57 is there any of those evils that a single transferable vote would not solve easily?
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