It seems to me that US politics took a turn for the worse in the past 20 years, and my response has been to disengage. Randomly, I picked up The Politics Industry by Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl, and I found it pretty convincing:
(a) The system of elections and legislation is responsible for the poor outcomes we see. It's not the specific personalities.
(b) That system's rules were written by the Republican and Democratic parties to entrench their power. It is NOT encoded in the constitution or otherwise set in stone. Both parties are winners with the status quo -- they do very well financially by drumming up tribalistic competition instead of cooperation and problem solving.
(c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job.
As an "average voter" that thinks the best route is probably somewhere in the middle (the world is complicated, and government is neither omnipotent nor impotent), me and everyone like me are not represented.
They present a surprisingly straightforward remedy:
(1) Adopt non-partisan primaries with Final Five ballots, which a couple states have already passed variants of (Final Four just passed in Alaska!)
(2) Ranked choice voting to remove the Spoiler reason ("don't throw your vote away") that keeps independents or third parties out.
I came away optimistic about the future. Highly recommended!
> (c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job.
I'm not sure how that's the conclusion you're drawing from this round of Democratic primaries.
He obviously isn't drawing that conclusion from "this round of democratic primaries". In a comment addressing 20 years of history, your attempt to revoke it involves looking at what one half of the parties did in the most recent few months.
OK, but go back all the way to Bill Clinton and it's clear that this pattern does not fit the trends in the Democratic Party at all. In fact, the Dems have been quite successful at beating back progressives for decades. Big hole in the "polarization" narrative. Party insiders pulling out all the stops to make a Sanders win unlikely just makes it obvious in a way it might not have been previously.
Pew seems to indicate that the democratic party (or at least the electorate) has moved significantly leftward, particularly after the 2016 election. It doesn't seem that polarization is unique to a particular party. Moreover, I would argue that a self described socialist becoming one of the most important voices in the party is actually evidence of this leftward movement.
The whole point I'm making is that the Democratic Party has beat back the challenge from its base far more effectively than the Republicans, to the point that the argument just won't fit. Despite Sanders' high favorability among many Democratic voters, there's no evidence he's going to be very "influential" anytime soon.
They (The Democratic party) have been able to beat back challengers because their selection process for the presidential candidate is ironically less democratic than the Republicans. The GOP super delegates cannot vote against the way their state voted and they have less influence. The DNC super delegates have a greater influence and do not have to vote inline with their state.
As for Sanders. He has lost influence because he betrayed his base twice (he endorsed a candidate that the base consider to be totally corrupt) and lets face it he is too old now.
That's a factor but they have also been more willing to coordinate to stop outside challengers, like when everyone (including the frontrunner!) stepped aside to make way for Biden.
Base aside, I think Sanders isn't influential because the party insiders are strongly opposed to him. By way of contrast, despite a disastrous primary run, look at Kamala Harris.
On the one hand, the Democratic Presidential primary had overwhelming support for the most moderate candidate available. On the other hand, Democratic Congressional primaries have started to get a little silly in terms of how vicious the internecine fights can get between people who fundamentally disagree on very little, my favorite example being Ritchie Torres vs Samelys López in the Bronx.
It's more than a little silly. A viscous fight with someone you hardly disagree with indicates that you either don't believe in their ability to execute, or that you're more invested in the power than the policy. It's a bad look.
Or the third option, which I believe was at work in the example I gave: you're very invested in your least popular policies, which you have the greatest differences with your opponent about.
Nasty fights between people who disagree on little don't suggest more polarization -- they suggest that candidates aren't facing that much serious ideological challenge, which is what we'd expect to see if it were really true that Democrats were going further and further left in an effort to please their base. You can point to a couple examples like Ocasio-Cortez, but I think it is fair to say that this trend is nowhere near as pronounced as you've seen with grassroots conservatism.
I agree with a lot of this although I would get ride of "to entrench". I think assuming intentionality is both a big assumption and not really necessary to describe the issue.
This happens simply because the dynamics of a winner take all election. George Washington was against parties but it was inevitable they would form and did so quickly (not necessarily because of an evil condition but simply because it is good game theory)
The fact that the major parties are not fighting against rank choice voting leads me to believe that they don't have a preference for a two-party system necessarily. It just isn't a main motivator.
this is why Trump was such a welcome change despite his style. he owed no one and thus were able to remove 8 rule for every one he implemented, challenge china, challenge coventional wisdom about middle east and get results that all the “experts” claimed to be impossible, change the global supply chain into something quite different than what the economists and experts said were oossible. Live him or hate him, Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view and i believe he will be much better judged by our dependents than most people today aknowledge
I would like to agree, as bringing pro worker rethoric, pushing against delocalization, a change of EEUU foreign policy, and not really being entrenched on the career politician POV were actually the parts of Trump I did like when he was running on 2016. But unfortunately I think he failed to deliver, and ultimately the positive changes were few and outnumbered by the negative ones.
> Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view
Of late that seems to be a decidedly non-democratic view (and by democratic I mean government, not party). I'm not sure that's the kind of disruption we needed in 2020.
All I saw was the drastic reduction of American hegemony by pulling out of bases and countries, losing the entire Asian pacific region to Chinese hegemony (partially due to the killing of TPP), losing Eastern European/middle eastern allies to Putin/Erdogan and denigrating moral standards that enabled authoritarians and dictators both at the government and lower levels. Picking a fight with China was probably the only good thing to come out of his presidency.
(a) The system of elections and legislation is responsible for the poor outcomes we see. It's not the specific personalities.
(b) That system's rules were written by the Republican and Democratic parties to entrench their power. It is NOT encoded in the constitution or otherwise set in stone. Both parties are winners with the status quo -- they do very well financially by drumming up tribalistic competition instead of cooperation and problem solving.
(c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job.
As an "average voter" that thinks the best route is probably somewhere in the middle (the world is complicated, and government is neither omnipotent nor impotent), me and everyone like me are not represented.
They present a surprisingly straightforward remedy:
(1) Adopt non-partisan primaries with Final Five ballots, which a couple states have already passed variants of (Final Four just passed in Alaska!)
(2) Ranked choice voting to remove the Spoiler reason ("don't throw your vote away") that keeps independents or third parties out.
I came away optimistic about the future. Highly recommended!
Here's their site if you'd like to learn more: https://gehlporter.com/