this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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The US falling apart would implicate that it was once whole, which it never was. It is just reaping the harsh fruits of half a century of aggressive 2 party campaigning.
All due to Ordinal voting. First Past the Post is the simplest Ordinal system, and completely broken if you have more than two candidates.
The only solution is a Cardinal voting system. Cardinal systems can handle two or twenty candidates without issues. Approval or STAR are the best options.
The sad part is, in 1780, First Past the Post was the only system available. It had to be adopted before mathematicians could look at it and say, hey shits broken.
The first was Condorcet. A French Mathematician who noticed the first problem with Plurality in the 1780s. But if you know your history, you'll know that being a French Nobleman in the 1780s was not the healthiest thing to be, regardless of how fucking based you were.
As an aside here, Condorcet was fucking based. He was antislavery, and argued for full suffrage for both women and the slaves that he wanted to free. He argued for universal education for all, and thought it would solve so many problems.
Anyway the next guy who saw the problem with Plurality was another French Mathematician and political scientist named Durverger. He proved that First Past the Post voting will always result in two party dominance. And he proved this in the 1950s. So not much to be done about it.
The next guy to put his name to voting science was Kenneth Arrow, an American who in the 1970s, showed that all Ordinal voting systems were flawed.
But again, the data came in far too late to easily fix things.
So here we are. The saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 year ago, the next best time is now. So call your local representative and ask them to sponsor a switch of voting system to Approval or STAR.
I'd say Direct Voting is the best solution if you care about democracy.
This "representative" bullshit needs to go.
No technical system of voting resolved the problem of monopolized media and a population stuffed full of nationalist propaganda.
Implement Cardinal voting at the Vatican and you'll still end up with a Catholic Pope
Fun fact, the Vatican did use Cardinal voting (Approval) for a few centuries, until some rich assholes took over.
But aside from that, your comment is useless.
The reason why the media can control the narrative is because of the voting system. See, it's super easy to control two sides. Two teams.
But if you have a dozen teams, it's much harder to control the narrative. And with a dozen teams, some of them will be on our side and will break up the media monopoly. Hell, we had Trust busters under or current system, we can have them again.
But I guess defeatism is comfortable for certain people. But it doesn't get anything done, so fuck that shit.
The media exists independent of the electoral system.
ESPN would argue otherwise.
It's only defeatism when you assume Cardinal voting is the only viable solution.
Obviously, that's not the case.
ESPN, famous for controlling who goes to the Super Bowl... Oh wait, they have no control over that because there are 32 teams.
They can't even control who fans cheer for. Again, because there are 32 teams. And dozens of sports that aren't football.
I agree that the media landscape is a huge problem that won't be directly solved by a different voting system, but I think that a changed voting system is a reasonable step towards solving the wider constellation of problems. A fairer voting system is a far more straightforward thing to solve than the media problem, which is probably better understood as a web of lots of different, but tightly linked problems.
If we imagined a world where the media/propaganda problem were solved, then that wouldn't make First Past The Post (FPTP) voting fair i.e. it would still be something we'd need to solve.
Of course, this isn't an either/or thing. I agree that we shouldn't expect Cardinal voting (or any other alternative voting system) to magically solve this fucked up situation, because problems like media will still exist. However, I do think that FPTP is reinforcing the problem of media monopolies and nationalistic popularism. Even if implementing Cardinal voting (or similar) doesn't directly improve the media problem, it would change the shape of the problem, such that we could tackle it on new fronts.
If we're forming a governing body from scratch, I agree. No reason to start the democratic process suboptimally.
But we've experimented with alternative voting schemes in the US before. Eric Adams was elected under Cardinal Voting, ffs. The rationalist theory of voting doesn't work in districts or elections where one candidate has an outsized war chest or media presence.
I would argue it's a symptom more than a problem. Systems that favor incumbents and reinforce entrenched interests are going to be championed by incumbents.
Past that, I don't really need ten mid candidates. I need one good one, with a coalition ready to rally behind them. Raising the intensity of competition and the number of competing factions makes for better TV drama than an election system.
I think the biggest problem I can cook up is that it's sort of hard to campaign on cardinal voting, especially at the federal level, because it's sort of an apolitical and nerdy topic that people don't know about and don't give a shit about. You'd probably have to campaign on giving people healthcare, or, responding to the economy, or any number of other issues that might come up in that particular cycle. You'd have to pass it as a total footnote to something else, which, at the federal level, probably wouldn't happen, precisely because it would threaten the power monopoly that both parties have as different sides of the same cardboard cutout. You'd get no votes congressionally to get that passed. You'd probably have to do a bunch of legislation before that, leading up to that, probably you'd have to get rid of citizen's united, yadda yadda. If you were the president theoretically you could add a lot of rhetorical pressure to specific members of congress, but that's more useful if you have like, a narrow margin, if you're outweighed by most then you'd probably ironically end up doing a lot of what trump is doing right now even though he has a majority.