Hacker News Reader

Comment by GingerMidas | Hacker News Reader

A FPTP two party system almost necessitates culture war, since by definition if you're for one party you're against the other.

At the end of the day you're forced to pick a side. The anchors are suggesting you ignore that eventuality.

View on HN

I think moving away from First Past the Post voting systems is a good thing, but it is not the panacea people are hoping it will be. Just because people can vote for viable third parties does not mean that polarization will go down. It’s possible that more parties may increase divisions.

But if no party has the majority, they will be forced to form coalitions on issues to get anything done. As it is now, whatever congress does is basically up to one person, the majority leader/speaker.

Getting things done and specific Congressional actions aren't how people get into emotional arguments and activism, though.

Germany pretty much always has coalition governments. We have 5-6 parties in parliament regularly. We have general blocs, though alliances might shift on topics, but generally you had the somewhat-far-left party, the social democrats and the greens being allied, and the then conservative CDU/CSU (now conservative-leaning centrist) and the financially conservative, socially liberal FDP on the other side.

You'd still have coalitions, e.g. right now it's CDU + SPD (social democrats), but the (published) split is there as much as it ever was. It's changing now, as a new conservative/far-right party has emerged, and the green party gets lots of love from the media and has won some state elections (on a conservative platform, ironically), so it's hard to say where we'll go from here.

I don't think more parties necessarily break it up. During the cold war, we had a Soviet bloc and a Western bloc, even though you had individual countries in each.

For specific example: Poland has FPTP system with viable third parties (somehow) and we still have strong polarization, divisiveness and culture war.

No, they're suggesting that the people who vote for either party don't have to hate each other with absolute hatred. They're saying that people should remember that they still have a lot in common. You can be against the other party because you disagree with their policies and still not think that they are evil that must be destroyed.

What you’re saying is certainly possible but I think an important question is whether or not it is more likely than the current situation? I ask this given the nature of humanity and the forces and incentives at play.

If the incentives in a democracy naturally tend towards outcomes where it has destroyed itself, either democracy is a bad idea or it requires regulation and oversight. As a liberal myself I believe democracy is an inherent good and requires care just like anything else.

Poland with a proportional system seems to be exactly as polarized as the US, and they do not even have enough ethnic diversity to serve as an ersatz explanation. The dividing lines run through families and neighborhoods of people who, to the outsider, look perfectly alike.

> At the end of the day you're forced to pick a side.

Who's forcing? It's possible to be in the center...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com