Make Democracy Great Again

Through the convention period, we have seen dissenting minorities in both parties. Ted Cruz has refused to endorse Donald Trump (who is a phenomena deserving his own article) and a vocal minority of Sanders supporters has booed Hillary Clinton. The heart of the issue is this: those people do not belong in the same party.

Trump’s platform is neo-isolationist. It’s a tradition that hasn’t been prominent in the US since World War II: withdraw from the international stage and let the world fight its own wars. Survive on the bountiful resources of America’s vast and fertile expanse.

The dominant alliance of global capitalists and social conservatives who make up the Republican party are not the people you would be expecting to be backing an isolationist candidate, particularly one in favour of birth control and gay marriage. The breaking of trade deals and withdrawal from international alliances is a recipe for the kind of instability which will reverse the fortunes of those who benefit from globalisation.

Hillary Clinton has accepted a few planks of Sanders’s platform by way of compromise, such as free university education. But she is in essence a continuity candidate: the same kind of economic and social liberal that has been prominent since the New Democrats. Sanders is, ideologically, a European social democrat who wants to expand the government’s role from merely guaranteeing the pursuit of happiness, to guaranteeing happiness.

I like Clinton, but behind Sanders she is my third choice. My first choice was Laurence Lessig. Both he and Sanders know American democracy is broken, but both have misdiagnosed the problem. The political reform agenda in the USA is all about getting the big money out of politics: why? It is not the amount of money that is the issue: it’s its concentration in two big parties.

Whenever voting reform is discussed in the US, it’s about voting rights, gerrymandering, or instant run off voting (which in Europe is called Alternative Vote). Instant run off voting makes much more sense than first past the post for electing a president. Imagine if instead of this clash of Trump and Clinton, you also had the choice of Sanders and Ted Cruz. By ranking the candidates and eliminating the least popular until only one is left, America would be making a compromise between camps on who it would prefer: it’s that kind of collaboration which keeps America’s government functional.

Congress is another matter. An executive is always one person, so IROV or AV makes sense. But your legislatures are made up of groups of individuals who represent particular territories. Now, because they represent territories, anyone elected to that committee will have at least 50% of the vote: they will then speak on behalf of 100% of the people, meaning that the 49.9% are denied their say for the rest of that term until they can convince the difference between their candidate and the elected representative to defect to their side of the aisle. Then the boot is on the other foot.

Unless you live in a constituency gerrymandered to your political preference, the chances are that at some point you have been without a voice in your legislature.

Is it any wonder American politics is dominated by advertising and smear campaigns? The stakes are way too high: every election is an opportunity for one party or another to dominate the next term in office. It is easier to make the other guy sound scary than to explain why your candidate is so good. Most people, after all, are not reading specific bills, news magazines or Leviathan trying to decide who is best for them: people are too busy working to do real politics.

First-past-the-post elections are a big factor in limiting the representation of women and minorities in the legislatures: typically, the American political candidate is a white male vetted by white males. It’s got better in recent years, but white males in congress are still disproportional relative to the number of voters of other genders and races. American politics could be more representative of minorities of all kinds: religiously, racially, and in terms of gender and sexuality.

It is also gridlocking Congress. Republican intransigence is a powerful tool even when their party is in the minority, as the US system operates like a permanent coalition government in a parliamentary system: in votes which require more than a simple majority, a minority party can gum up the whole process.

Under a proportional voting system, rather than having two titanic parties America would be electing multiple factions who would then have to reach compromises between themselves until the majority was achieved. To get a controversial environmental bill through, the Democrats could throw extra provisions in to please the Christian Democratic Party, Democratic Socialists, or the Libertarians, rather than being totally thwarted by a united Republican behemoth.

When there are four or five parties, there is no longer a totemic fault line through a political scene: politicians are no longer able to pit federalists and anti-federalists, gays and evangelicals, racists against races, or genders against one another. They are forced to seek compromise to get things done, much as Madison envisioned when writing the constitution (see the Federalist Papers, or Madison’s Metronome). You can’t smear today the guy you might need to pass your bill tomorrow.

While I was researching this article, I found that I was not the only person thinking along these lines. There is an organisation dedicated to reforming the American electoral system.

Whether you believe in making America great again, Ron Paul’s revolution, that you’re with her, that yes you can, or if you feel the Bern, if you agree with me that all Americans deserve not merely a vote but representation, check out Fair Vote and see what you can do to promote a better voting system.