Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship

Harvard Biz School prof Michael Porter and coauthor Katherine Gehl have observed that the two-party political system is a classic pepsi/coke duopoly, and it functions as designed. It's designed to perpetuate the revenue / power / relationships of members of the political-industrial complex. These are elected officials, but they're also staff, fundraisers, pollsters, ad agencies, newspapers, TV companies, even Facebook and Google; anybody who depends on politics (different from government) for their living.

I suspect the UK's Tory/Labour system is just as much a duopoly as the USA's Republican/Democratic system. Look at the House of Commons. The two parties sit across from one another shouting the equivalent of "Pepsi!" "Coke!"

We tech entrepreneur types know something about how hard it is to disrupt duopolies: they focus their efforts on resisting disruption. And the political duopoly is great at resisting disruption.

When the public perceives elections as drag races we pay attention to rubbish like "momentum" rather than good government appropriately sized. And that sets the duopoly free to serve themselves and not the population.

In the USA 2016 federal election, HRC was perceived as a duopolist and DJT as an outsider.

Attempts to limit campaign spending have the purpose of disrupting the duopoly. But that's a head-on disruption, like me developing a jet engine and trying to sell against GE and Pratt&Whitney. Doesn't work.

Maine has introduced rank-choice voting to allow candidates to make strong pitches about policies without becoming "spoilers." That can only help disrupt the duopoly. In fact it did in 2018. Some "minor" candidates had their voices heard.

California's primary elections are no longer in the duopoly system: all candidates are on one ballot, and the top two contend with each other in the general election. California could simply introduce a ranked-choice general election, which would have the same effect.

Here's the paper by Gehl and Porter. Worth your time. https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/why-competitio...

There are a number of structural things you can do to push back on the long-run capture of parties and therefore the political process. None of them play super well with party-list proportional representation, but here's what people should be thinking about, especially in places with party primaries:

- Require party primaries to be as open and competitive as general elections. This is the traditional American approach, and for all of its own the failure modes that we've seen since 2013, you can't say that the problem has been beigeness enforced by party elites. Ask Eric Cantor, Jeb Bush, and Joe Crowley about that.

- Replace party primaries for single-member districts altogether, with open primaries with STV or approval voting. That gives even more room for policy entrepreneurs whose appeal may cut across existing party power bases.

- Make heavier use of Sortition and/or policy juries, delegating decisions to randomly-selected deliberative bodies. That gives you lots of democratic legitimacy in a way that's very hard to capture. Tellingly, this approach is already used for the State's most dangerous powers around criminal punishment.

I'd like to like the article, but it nostalgically posits a golden age of amateur politicians.

Even Lincoln was a lawyer.

Before the Roman Empire, there were still people who spent most of their waking moments striving for power.

Rose-colored glasses don't serve us well.

tl;dr

the author of this "random meta-political noodling" (his words) has re-invented some of the old arguments for direct democracy that have been perpetuated from all fringe parties in all countries since democracy exists.

Remember the German Green Party's "rotation principle". It was based on the same arguments, to prevent "professional politicians" and keep politics close to the basis. They gave it up soon once they realized that it's not working. It turned out that politicians need some political competence that is acquired through parliamentary work, and they need to have media presence to be re-elected.

Everything in this blog posts could have been written in the 70s when these arguments and radical "basic democratic" desires had already been discussed ad nauseum by the less radical revolutionaries.

Personally, I believe that when a representational democracy is turned into a basic democracy with amateur politicians, then it will succumb to populism and become a dictatorship in no time.

I think Stross is on the right track but doesn't get the whole story. It's all about regulating the rate of change in society. Institutions naturally tend toward preserving the status quo, for all the reasons Stross specifies. But institutions that prohibit change altogether do not survive. The tendency toward "beigeness" comes about as political actors converge on a level of change-permissiveness (and thus functional rate of change) that optimally compromises between conservatives and liberals (in the sense of those against and for change respectively). Too much change is scary because it seems unstable. Too little is scary because it seems oppressive. So political actors seem beige because they are selected for moderation between those extremes. The changes they permit are thus inoffensive to a plurality of citizens and the changes they prohibit are equally inoffensive. And therefore equally distinteresting.

I like Stross' essays, but I think this one is slightly off the mark. Sure, everything he says makes sense, more or less, but we also have to ask whether this convergence happens for a reason other than the simple one he outlines.

After all, we can see examples of convergent evolution is a huge variety of fields - biological evolution, product design, scientific theories etc. If independent groups/individuals set out to achieve some aim, oftentimes their answers will turn out very similar to each other. And there's nothing that says "The People" have to find some particular solution intuitively appealing. In this case, he says alternatives aren't presented as choices, but is that because of the mechanism he outlines, or because those choices aren't really choices and were whittled out for very good reasons?

I actually think anti-vaccine thought can be very helpful in explaining way more than the anti-vax movemement. At its core it represents a set of people raised in a safe, secure environment without the living memory or first-hand experience of a problem. Only logical, rational, book-memory remains, as well as the "rituals". But this sort of memory is weak, unintuitive and requires a certain mindset and education. So opponents start to question whether this thing is even real, they employ stronger, emotional arguments, they appear as "outsiders" demanding "choices" etc.

So how much of this is the Iron Law of Oligarchy and how much is the Anti-vax mindset spreading to the political realm?

(2013)

(2013)

It seems people have found a route out of beige, the Trump/Brexit outsider victory. This is ... not an improvement.

The situation has gotten so bad, and the political machine is totally oblivious, because they are only listening to the people who fund their campaigns; in other words, moneyed elites. The rest of us are deeply in debt, isolated, taking medication to cope. The vast majority of the country supports healthcare for all but it’s still considered politically impossible. I worry that we’re living in France circa 1785. When the dam bursts it’s going to be ugly.