Whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar

This takes us in the opposite direction from his conclusion for activists (essentially, give up because it doesn't matter) toward a more productive one that asks, if left/right party politics does not produce meaningful change, then what kind of politics can?

There's also a clever load-bearing phrase buried in here that sweeps the explanation for real variation in policy under the rug: "these governments followed the spirit of the age." Now, what is the spirit of the age but the movement of politics?

Of course, the author's motivations are clearer if you look at the other trash that they've written: an article about not being ideological (recently litigated on hacker news [1]), dozens of posts ragging about "the left," and a few articles about how much they hate trans people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957328

I'm constantly told the conclusions of the article and how I'm much better off getting my taxes lowered, but there are just plainly obvious differences between living in a red or blue state. I grew up in a red state that is purple now and the back and forth major policy changes depending on the party in charge are palpable. Even with my increased salary and status at work that has me going to fewer of the places I grew up going to and being around a variety of people, I know voting Republican has a much greater chance of hurting cousins, aunts, childhood friends that maybe didn't get the chances I got in my immediate family.

I also know no matter how well I do in life, I'm just one traffic stop away from death or disaster and I'd rather side with the party that at least occasionally tries to hold police accountable for their actions.

I'll differentiate between democrats and third party candidates but I'll never cast a vote for anyone with R next to their name, unless there's some great switch like a massively racist candidate like Barry Goldwater.

The RepubliCratic cancer needs to go, but I doubt it will.

Why? It actively votes against the will of the population, in service of the wealthy donors who fund their reelection campaigns.

There may be some areas of government that see relatively few differences, especially in the machinery of the bureaucracy. But in other areas the article's thesis couldn't be more wrong.

Taxes, guns, COVID lockdowns, abortion, and many other issues have laws directly attributable to what party is in power.

But I'd also argue that this problem (policies are similar no matter what party rues) is not one of the trivial ones.

It's one of the hard ones, because it is sometimes true (especially in dual party systems like the US). And in other - very important - cases, it's suddenly not true.

In other words, the limits of politics are mostly very narrow, but sometimes frighteningly wide. Covid is a prime example.

We (society, citizens, politicians, scientists) need to do a better job understanding the state transitions from narrow to wide; but it's a hard question because there are so incredibly many factors and very small N (few observations, cannot easily transfer insights from one leader to another due to biography, for example).

My feeling is that this changes dramatically when you look at local politics, which is where most of the interesting action is. There's not much that the French government can do that, when zoomed out, is fundamentally different from Germany or Spain. There's a lot more leeway when you compare Tokyo or Shanghai with Mexico City.

That's not a secret. As shown by the old saw: "Whoever you vote for the government always gets in."

And it is easily explained by the huge inertia of vast numbers of people who rather like stability.

The politicians in the modern Western world mostly just give speeches and make deals and go to meetings. Sure they can guide policy to varying degrees, but implementation is through the bureaucracy.

I have to imagine when a new leader or parliamentarian comes to town (if they haven't been in town for years already and know "how things work") they are immediately set upon by a plethora of advisors and "experts" who explain reality and what must be done.

The politician then most likely see the light, but if not, they proceed to run into massive difficulties and very probably won't be there long.

I'm only familiar with the system in the US, but I think this explains why people vote for something, then none of it happens, even the reverse.

Why is engagement or "populism" still an end in itself, if it makes little effective difference? I can imagine its not "engagement" per se, that is desired, it is discipline. (Edit) Isn't this precisely what failed on January 6th? People (for mostly delusional reasons) were angry at a break down of politics itself, in their mind.

The sports analogy makes sense, but there are economic interests there, on the part of the owners of the teams and the league, engagement by people to an arbritray cause translates to more tickets to the games, ad revenue for the broadcasts. There is maybe a distinction there, at least.

So be aware that a few top level comments will be responding to the "secret revealed" click bait nature of the title.

1. The purchase of votes

2. The purchase of politicians

This will always yield oligarchy.

There is no magical law that will change this, as all law gets pretty much ignored by those in power when it suits their needs and used as a tool to hammer only their opponents.

There is no magical system that will change this: red, blue, libertarian, green, communist, alt-right, whatever… people constantly think that if just “insert thing here” would happen then it would be solved. It won’t. History did have socialist, fascist, free market, democratic, communist, and very type of system in play at some point somewhere, and they all end poorly due to the basics of humanity. Politicians and votes can both be purchased and otherwise power is centered in too few hands and becomes tyrannical.

So far, the systems that have worked best are all now hated for reason or another, and the world uses “democracy” as a synonym for “goodness” while every so-called democracy is at best corrupt and at worst the enemy of its population.

The 20th century saw the largest amount of slaughter by secular humanist states of their own people. These were varying styles of government. They all fail to enact the will of the governed.

But at the local level, things really are different.

Well, nothing changed. It's not the Democrats doing. It's industry bring in Mexicans for cheap labor. For example, in chicken processing factories. Americans don't want these jobs. But corporations don't want small town Americans to blame them for the foreign influx, so they blame Democrats in a constant drum beat on right wing media. "Democrats need new voters. They get them by bringing them here and putting them on welfare." When their people are in charge, they get them to claim they're building a wall and they're dealing with this influx that happened under Democrats.

Corporations and industry shift the blame away from themselves for any social problem caused by the influx of cheap labor, even though they are responsible for it. Nothing changes under either party in power, only the blame rhetoric gets changed. That's political science in America.

Wouldn't it be weird to, for example, pass single payer national healthcare under D and then repeal it 4-8 years later under R?

The fact that our political systems avoid radical swings is a feature. Certainly change happens on a longer timescale, which sounds reasonable to me.

Someone who self identifies as educated is untroubled by sustaining cognitive dissonance because from their perspective, the state and establishment is almost infinitely sophisticated and complex, so there is no reason to think you understand it, you just need to identify as it being yours, and by aligning to it by default and sustaining it, you are doing your part, and you get the rewards it offers. This is Pound's hedgehog knowing one thing. The one thing they need to know is if you sustain the establishment narrative, it will sustain you. Its leviathan vastness means you can't decide what about it is real or true, but you can find the hooks to align to it, and this is The Game people talk about. I have criticized the immoderate version of this in the past as "banal nihilism," but more generally, and charitably, there is an establishment We who ask things like what is to be done, and use terms like oxygen-starving, problematic, extremists, and other meta-social managerial terms to discuss how we will manage society. However, their ontology reduces to an infinte attrition game of musical chairs to determine who this We will include.

At the other pole are those who are attached to the idea of Truth. We can criticize it as a need for concreteness and a lack of cognitive or educated ability to engage The Game as an abstraction separate from their identities (like the from-somewhere and from-nowhere dichotomy), and so when a politician says something, we might take it at face value, and not as a signal of alignment to an abstraction. This ontology includes principles, expectations, loyalties, immovable facts, laws of the universe, consequences, permanence, stability. These are Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind tribes, but with a twist where it's not right/left. Other criticisms I've heard is of relating "transactionally," to people, where there is objectivity, truth, roles, state, and definition. What I would say is there is an underlying axiom that there is a truth that is objective, persistent, and independent of whether it's observed, and when you align to it, it makes us good. Even if good for what is not always clear. The key piece is it both instinctively and competently rejects dissonance as a misalignment to truth. In this view, if something is untrue it cannot be relatively powerful or legitimate. This orientation to truth is what makes trust that would facilitate reconciliation or even an equillibrium increasingly impossible.

There are a lot of frameworks for this including Jungian animus/anima, Marxist classes, Girardian memesis groups, etc. In the 90s when the so-called "neocons" arrived, they were a weird hybrid of these Game playing conservatives who appeared to support capitalistic ideas, but had an intellectual smarm and who looked down on others' inability to appreciate that this was just them playing this Game as an abstraction. The smarm was because they knew they were lying and didn't care. Tucker Carlson was very famously destroyed by John Stewart over this, and that takedown marked a cultural turning point, where I think the neocons popularly legitimized into the establishment the tactics of what people self-identify now as the "dirtbag left." (not an epithet, it's their word)

But this idea of liar becomes the friction point, because from both the dynamic We and the stable truth perspective, yes, Truth is Power, but it depends on the directionality of that equivalence. Are they equal, is one a superset or subset of the other, is there causation between them and in what direction does it flow? This is what someone means when they say, "depends on what the meaning of is, is."

What makes this conflict over what is is so irreversible is that a politics moored to geography, language, physical resources, growth, and a positive-sum planet and economics was durable against being pulled too far from one direction or another. Even warfare was a temporary disequillibrium. The change was in the 20th century when a viral idea that power was independent of these landmarks took hold, and that political power came not from these things, but from pure narrative and belief. For the first time, politics became understood as the totality of human experience.

The immediate consequence of this newly moralized unmooring of power from truth was that from the perspective of power, all these things and even populations were liquid. Over a century downstream in time, the idea that politics is reserved to professional politicans is absurd. The political is the personal, everything is political, there is no separate private and public sphere. The individual is powerless, atomized, and the only real currency is the fluid affinity to group interests. Our societies are now post-totalitarian.

What the authors seem to miss is that this is a total failure of politics, and it is not only Hobbes' "war of all against all," but the inherent violence in that failure mode is beyond what someone just going along to get along could possibly concieve of. The big secret of political science in a post-totalitarian world is that it is predicated on advocating unforgivable and irreconcilable deceptions without a great deal of thought about what the concrete consequences of that will be. Maybe my career in tech and risk has made me index on catastrophic outcomes, but this is not longer about my guy vs. your guy. The conversation we should be having is whether we prefer to reach an equillibrium using discourse moored to at least some of those landmarks, or, and I say this quite seriously, the failure mode of politics is cannibalism, and it would be constructive to consider this when we're at each other.

Why can’t these people own up the ideology they ascribe to..? Or are they actually under the wrong impression that they are somehow conducting “neutral” economic analysis?