More Thoughts on American Governance: Why Do We Have a Two-Party System?

I recently had a discussion with a professor of mine on how and why our political system barely functions, as evidenced by the unprecedented phenomenon of refusing to vote for raising the debt ceiling without massive concessions in return. (Also evidenced by everything Congress does, but we’ll keep it at that.) Naturally, the topic of our political system being confined to its current two-party reality came up. A lot of people, whether they happen to thoroughly follow Washington or not, agree that a political system with a more robust offering of ideological parties would be better than the status quo. Although people’s reasoning for why this would be so isn’t always necessarily anchored in reason, this opinion seems to be popular.

I’m not positive as to whether this has been adequately polled or not but there is at least this from May 9th by Gallup, which is still telling:

Back to the conversation: After listening to my complaints, this solution to the problem was brought forth. As is most commonly the case when it’s brought forth, though, it’s done so in a way that errs on the side of simplicity. If we want to add more political parties to the mix, we need to understand why the system is the way it is currently. The framers didn’t put into our constitution a clause that mandates a two-party system. In fact, they didn’t say anything whatsoever about political parties.

Unsurprisingly, it’s more nuanced than voters not biting the bullet and voting for a third party’s candidate en masse. Stripped down to its most basic level, we elect members to the House of Representatives and the Senate and the Presidency through a voting method called first-past-the-post. It’s simple: there’s a pool of candidates, you vote for which one you like, the guy or gal with the most votes wins. This style of voting militates toward our unsavory two-party system; Duverger’s Law, via Wikipedia:

A two-party system often develops from the single-member district plurality voting system (SMDP). In an SMDP system, voters have a single vote which they can cast for a single candidate in their district, in which only one legislative seat is available. The winner of the seat is determined by the candidate with the most votes. This means that the SMDP system has several qualities that can serve to discourage the development of third parties and reward the two major parties.

Duverger suggests two reasons why single-member district plurality voting systems favor a two party system. One is the result of the “fusion” (or an alliance very like fusion) of the weak parties, and the other is the “elimination” of weak parties by the voters, by which he means that the voters gradually desert the weak parties on the grounds that they have no chance of winning.

To put this into real terms, by voting for a Green Party candidate or a Libertarian in the U.S., you are wasting your vote. Furthermore, (using the left side of the spectrum in the U.S. as an example) by voting for a Green Party candidate, you are doing more harm than good than if you voted for the Democrat, even if you don’t totally agree with the platform of the Democratic candidate. Principle be damned, you’re hurting your cause. This is essentially the root of the saying that I’m sure everyone hears a hundred times every couple years: “voting for the lesser of two evils”.

If we want to get serious about political reform in the United States then we’re going to need to examine how we vote and, minus something genius from a crafty political scientist, change it. I suggest something along the lines of IRV.

It also needs mentioning that this steps aside the larger, institutional problem with our legislature, which would prevent the addition of more political parties from effecting any substantial progress. That is for another time, though.

I’ll Let Reggie Take it From Here

All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today,” James said. “They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. So they can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they got to get back to the real world at some point.

At the end of the day, Lebron James will have to get back to the real world. The world in which he isn’t as good at his job as he thinks he is.

To be an Environmentalist, You Need to Understand What Helps the Environment

I’d been putting this one off for a while now, but I finally finished Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser and I just wanted to throw down a couple things. Now, book reviews aren’t really my forte so I don’t want to say a whole lot about the book—you should read it instead!—besides that it’s really good and brings to a brighter light a lot of important questions and prescriptions regarding urban public policy at a time when the populations of the world are undergoing some fairly radical shifts in terms of geographic distribution and socioeconomic status.

If I could boil the book down to one key takeaway, it’s this: per capita carbon-dioxide emissions are negatively correlated with density, so in the realistic context of continued improvements in standards of living throughout the world, living in incredibly big cities is the most environmentally friendly thing we can do.

An interesting thing about this is that it’s always understood either as the most obvious thing, or most wrongheaded thing you could possibly say. Which is to say that there is a lot of wrong and bad environmentalism out there. Examples being the opposition to denser development and barriers to new construction in some of our most productive metro areas in the country—basically a lot of terribly unjustified NIMBYism. Another being the Thoreausian view of surrounding yourself with nature, living in vast, horizontally dispersed arrangements—this being something that we actively promote through numerous policies.

As for the former, when it’s overly difficult to build new housing in an area—that could include any number of zoning regulations, preservation restrictions, or simply riling up the neighbors for whatever reason—the demand for that housing doesn’t just go away. And that’s important to remember when you’re someone living in, say, Santa Clara County, who considers themselves environmentally conscious and raises hell when some developer tries to build some townhouses or condos nearby. The people who would have loved to live in those units now have to live in some place where the climate isn’t literally perfect for human occupation and will need to run the AC in the summer and the heat in the winter and drive their cars to work instead of riding public transit, emitting loads more carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere doing so. It’s not just Santa Clara either, where the supply and demand for housing is so stunted that the median home price is close to $800,000; it’s a lot of cities that lots of people want to live in but are unable to because they’re priced out by lack of supply. Local environmentalism is bad environmentalism.

All that being said, we have a long way to go and a lot of hurdles to clear before we’re “there”. But we need to try to get there because, as Glaeser points out, it’s going to be rather difficult to persuade newly middle-class Indians and Chinese that they should live in a socially responsible way and not foolishly sprawl while we are still doing it. And it’s imperative that they do this the right way because global emissions of greenhouse gases are going to skyrocket if not. 

The short version of all this is that the fight to get people to realize that there is such a thing as a natural environment that should be protected has, for the most part, been won in the United States. Now it’s time to focus on determining the ideas and policies that actually provide environmentally beneficial outcomes in the aggregate. The way we arrange our society spatially is going to continue playing a large role in that discussion.

A Lot of the Senate’s Time is Spent Doing Nothing

As I’ve written previously, the United States Senate doesn’t work anymore [see the most recent post besides this, or the old blog]. This is due in large part to the adoption of the scorched-earth politicking of the minority parties of recent, which includes, but is not limited to, rampant use of the filibuster. As seen in the above graph by Ezra Klein, which shows the number of attempts to invoke cloture, the use of the filibuster has exploded. It bears noting that this doesn’t account for the countless times a filibuster is merely threatened, killing the item, or the times a motion for cloture isn’t even filed because the majority leader knows there aren’t enough votes to break the filibuster. Meaning that it’s even worse than what the graph shows, if that’s believable. 

The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold reports that the 112th Congress has of course picked right back up where the 111th left off—again it’s specifically the Senate that’s behind this. However, this time, it’s even less than the most meaningless and obstructive of filibustering that’s getting accomplished. 

In the U.S. Senate, this is what nothing sounds like.

“Mr. Akaka.” 

At 9:36 a.m. on Thursday, a clerk with a practiced monotone read aloud the name of Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii). The chamber was nearly deserted. The senator wasn’t there. Not that she was really looking for him.

Instead, the clerk was beginning one of the Capitol’s most arcane rituals: the slow-motion roll calls that the Senate uses to bide time.

These procedures, called “quorum calls,” usually serve no other purpose than to fill up empty minutes on the Senate floor. They are so boring, so quiet that C-SPAN adds in classical music: otherwise, viewers might think their TV was broken.

This year — even as Washington lurches closer to a debt crisis — the Senate has spent a historic amount of time performing this time-killing ritual. Quorum calls have taken up about a third of its time since January, according to C-SPAN statistics: more than 17 eight-hour days’ worth of dead air.

You can’t really blame these guys though—OK, yes, you definitely can, but not in that way. There’s no reason to be there or do anything when it’s impossible to get anything accomplished. The Democratic majority has no reason to bring up legislation, or try to confirm Presidential nominees, or do anything that requires more than 53 votes for that matter (that’s effectively everything, by the way!), when whatever action will almost certainly be ground into the dirt. The Senate has evolved beyond being a place where all things go to die into a place where all things are teleported back in time and never born.

As for C-SPAN, they have a conundrum on their hands:

[…] C-SPAN worries that its library of classical background music has been over-used. It is trying to expand its options, within a set of strict conditions: The music must be “calm and benign.” No cannon-booming “1812 Overture.” No funeral marches.

And it must not imply any comment on the nothingness happening onscreen.

Let’s ignore that last restriction, since the fact that music is being played implicitly comments negatively on the nothingness happening onscreen. I suggest Strauss’ Metamorphosen; it’s fairly calm and benign, depending on how you approach it. More importantly, though, it mourns the ruin of another neo-classical building of prominence.

The Causes of Political Polarization Seem Pretty Obvious

Peter Orszag, former OMB Director for President Obama, provides his thoughts and a few hypotheses on our increasingly polarized politics, and why that is, in a Bloomberg op-ed published yesterday. He notes, rightfully so, that polarization in our current political context is troublesome:

Our political system is so plagued by polarization, it’s difficult to move any legislation forward. In the late 1960s, significant overlap existed in votes cast by the most conservative Democrats in Congress and those cast by the most liberal Republicans. (See accompanying chart: Polarization in Congress.) By the late 1980s, the common ground had diminished. Today, it has virtually disappeared.

This overlap was due in part to a more geographical nature to voting blocs—an example being the large contingent of southern Democrats devoted to the preservation of institutionalized white supremacy in the 1960s. Nowadays, our political parties are split along ideological lines. I think it’s safe to say that the most liberal Republican is securely to the right of the most conservative Democrat, like Mr. Orszag says. It may be the case that Scott Brown or either of the Senators from Maine are more liberal than Ben Nelson, but what it ultimately comes down to is their voting records, and their voting records say that isn’t true.

What we now have are two parties that are much more disciplined than their previous selves and much more devoted to doing whatever it takes to win elections, i.e., filibustering everything under the sun and letting the public assign blame to the only place that makes sense—the people in the majority, who are unable to pass legislation.

Orszag, citing Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort, thinks this polarization—displayed almost exclusively on the right—is due to reasons other than the simple reality that we live in a two-party system in which one half of the spectrum has totally lost their shit and abandoned moderation and sensibility while maintaining electoral competitiveness by playing fatalist, country-loses-we-win politics:

One crucial cause, as documented in “The Big Sort,” a path-breaking book by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, is increased residential segregation by political party. We are voluntarily separating ourselves into Republican and Democratic neighborhoods. Today’s media and blogosphere, which increasingly filter news according to their point of view, exacerbate and reinforce the effect.

Two maps (see accompanying maps: 1976 Election and 2008 Election), taken from a recent paper by James Thomson of the RAND Corp., show the U.S. broken down by county (county lines have also not been redistricted). The dark-shaded counties are those that have swung hard one way or another in a presidential election, and so are considered polarized, while the light counties are politically mixed. The difference from 1976 to 2008 is striking: The number of light counties has fallen sharply. Roughly 25 percent more of the U.S. population now lives in a landslide county than did in the 1970s.

I don’t see how this geographical redistribution leads to anything other than some additional safe seats for each party. And I’m especially confused as to how it leads to an uncompromising, semi-dysfunctional legislature. Peter Orszag is an economist, so he should know that people respond to incentives. Just like people are going to move for whatever reason provides them the most utility, politicians are going to behave in a maximizing way, too. The incentives to work together are clearly misaligned when a minority party can successfully act to the detriment of the majority party’s legislative agenda and be electorally successful.

I also don’t see how polarization amongst parties necessitates a polarized electorate. The average American voter is someone who doesn’t pay too much attention to politics, has moderate views on social issues, and knows nothing about economics. Yet, despite these realities, elected Republicans, who won office in a midterm election amidst the greatest economic downturn in 80 years with vacuous statements about jobs, proceeded to gut collective bargaining, pass anti-abortion legislation, disenfranchise the young, hold the country’s credit hostage, propose privatizing Medicare, defend financial institutions from new regulation after those financial institutions tanked the world economy on their watch, etc etc. Poll these things with the public and it’s obvious that none of them are popular. Pinky promise. At least they aren’t amongst non-cranks, and it’s the non-cranks that decide elections, usually basing their vote solely on the direction they feel the economy is moving. And it’s the candidates that the non-cranks vote into office who do the unpopular things listed above. It’s not a polarized country; it’s a broken system.

So the obvious solution is for the public to pay more attention and better acquaint themselves with legislative processes and tactics. I’m not very inspired by that.

Mr. Orszag recommends a better route:

The best bet on what will happen in Washington is, therefore, nothing — until and unless it has to. The Big Sort generates gridlock, making it increasingly difficult for lawmakers to tackle anything from climate change to budget balancing.

Clearly, redistricting reform won’t help us much. Instead, we should try to create a new set of rules and institutions that can use legislative inertia to our benefit — just as a growing body of tools in the private sector, such as automatic- enrollment 401(k) plans, are using inertia there to produce better outcomes.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board, created to constrain cost growth and improve quality in Medicare, without new legislation, is one example of trying to leverage legislative inertia. The key is that inaction by Congress allows the IPAB’s recommendations to take effect.

Another example is the backstop fiscal trigger currently being discussed as part of the debt-limit negotiations. With this mechanism in place, congressional inaction would lead to automatic spending cuts and/or revenue increases (and, by the way, the trigger should include both). Here again, legislative inaction wouldn’t mean failure to address a problem.

The era of gridlock government is unlikely to disappear overnight. We might as well figure out how to function with it.

This is fine in the intermediate, I guess, but we’re in trouble outside of that. Concrete things need to happen if you want to correct our democratic inefficiencies. Our campaign-finance law needs serious amending; the filibuster needs to go; there are various other voting methods that are vastly superior to First Past the Post such as Instant Runoff Voting, which has the potential to alleviate us of our two-party problems, and give the political middle more salience.

I could go on, but I’ll conclude by saying that our political system is flawed in ways that incentivize polarization but can’t accommodate it. I just disagree with Mr. Orszag on the factors that create this. American society is no more polarized than those of other western liberal democracies. Other western liberal democracies just have slightly better systems of governance that circumvent these negatives.

This is the New Breed of Conservatism

From TPM:

Doug Holtz-Eakin is warning that a default arising from failure to raise the debt limit would have serious consequences and should be avoided. That’s a pretty major statement coming from Holtz-Eakin, who has been onboard with Republicans demanding spending cuts before agreeing to raising the debt limit. It also puts him at odds with elected Republicans who have dismissed default as inconsequential.

To which I say… isn’t just about every mainstream and rational policy at odds with elected Republicans right now?

“…who have dismissed default as inconsequential”. The weight of that affect is crushing.

Palin Fans Hit Paul Revere’s Wikipedia Entry

There is no rest for Sarah Palin’s fearless crusaders, who must be on constant guard to stomp out liberal bias—also known as “things that disagree with what Sarah Palin says”. The target this time is Wikipedia and the invaluable information therein. I guess it’s really just an attack on information, which makes sense since history and facts and things like that are always getting in the way. Man, that stuff’s annoying.

Since Sarah Palin tried describing Paul Revere’s ride through modern day Middlesex County in order to warn that the British were on their way to capture two of the American rebel leaders, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, Palin supporters have been on a fierce editing spree attempting to align recorded history—the stuff I just said—with Sarah Palin history—way different than what I just said.

He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed.

Sarah Palin will be damned if everything about the American Revolution wasn’t centered on the second amendment being encroached upon, despite the second amendment not being a real thing for another decade or so.

And her supporters will be damned if everything she says isn’t correct! You can view the historical revision here at the article’s revision-history page. Or, better yet is the discussion page, where Palinites wage verbal war with the countervailing socialist truth-deniers.

Tomwsulcer - You should be kindly reminded that it’s not your job to debase Sarah Palin’s wiki page with (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sarah_Palin) your version of the occurrence for political reasons. The left leaning bias on Wiki is well known, but these types attacks are over the top. Mk

Snap!

Bungie is Bad at Making Video Games

Recently, I’ve come to the realization that Bungie—maker of one of the biggest video game franchises in history, Halo—isn’t actually good at making video games. That might sound like a bold or ignorant statement, but it shouldn’t to anyone who has played any of the latest iterations of the series.

I’ve been a Halo fan since the first entry of the series, Halo: Combat Evolved, which launched with the original Xbox. To be brief, having grown up in the GoldenEye era, Halo: Combat Evolved was the most addictive multi-player game of all time.

(The multi-player, by the way, will be the main focus of this diatribe.)

It was pretty phenomenal. Phenomenal to the point that it single-handedly created a competitive gaming organization—MLG. The game played a large role in selling the Xbox to millions of people.

Then Halo 2 came out and it was bad. Bad enough that it needed a major gameplay patch to address the plethora of balance issues.

And let me say right away that this isn’t a “It sucked because there was no pistol” argument—the pistol was one of the starting weapons in the most played game-setting of Halo: Combat Evolved’s multi-player and was a fantastic weapon, which, actually, according to a statement by a Bungie employee, was mistakenly made so awesome.

This is a “The game was bad because it was bad” argument. The default starting weapons sucked; matchmaking was plagued with cheating and network issues; and the addition of dual-wielding created a lot of balance issues with other weapons.

The thing that saved Halo 2 was its maps, which were great, and numerous. The fact that most of the things listed above were addressed by said patch also helped dramatically. However, that patch wasn’t released for many months after the release of the game. MLG, who obviously dictates its own game-settings for competitive play, released some great variations also. All of these things, eventually, led to a fun game.

The same thing happened with Halo 3 except all that stuff about the game getting progressively better and fun never happened. The game just sucked from start to finish. The guns were the same or maybe slightly worse. The maps were awful.

Halo Reach, the fourth in the series, is simply an astoundingly bad video game.

If I can just go into slight detail about some of the more obvious transgressions:

Theater: The theater mode was a Halo 3 addition that allowed you to save gameplay footage, make clips out of them, and watch any of it in-game. You could upload them to your personal, free file sharing account and share them with your friends. It was pretty cool, and pretty darn new to the console world, which was used to having to purchase capture-cards and various other pieces of equipment to share gameplay footage and what-have-you. It was an awesome feature.

Halo Reach’s theater is actually worse than Halo 3’s. They literally went backward.

This is what I have to do if I want to watch a video with someone: we both have to back out of multi-player, requiring us to be in an Xbox Live Party so that we can still talk, go to theater, and then attempt to verbally sync up the video with a totally idiotic 3-2-1 countdown so that we’re at the same point before hitting play. It’s annoying and not worth it. In fact, if someone I’m playing with exclaims, “Oh my God, we have to go watch what just happened! Hahaha, amazing!” I just say, “No, we’re not doing that.” I’d rather not relive an awesome overkill that just sent us into fits of laughter than fiddle with the craptastic theater.

Forge: If there has ever been a more promising, potentially awesome feature that has somehow fallen on its face harder than the forge mode in Halo Reach, I have not seen it. The point of Forge World is to allow you to make basically any type of map you want out of hundreds of preset pieces in a giant, open world with a beautiful environment.

Unfortunately, if you attempt to do anything of that nature and play the map you just created, you will instead just sputter around at about 5 frames per second, doing nothing. Did I mention that building the map is the most tedious experience in the world? No need: that’s implied by the controller in your hand and whatever kind of nonsense the controls for Forge are.

Forge, again, found its beginning in Halo 3! Yes, this too was done better in Halo 3. Somehow, the developers at Bungie ruined another perfectly decent thing.

And like I said, those are only some of the more obvious, non-gameplay related obscenities. There are plenty of things that you get to encounter every multi-player game you play.

•  Your guns get wildly inaccurate as you shoot them—that’s actually a feature they added on purpose and bragged about: Bloom.

• They added jetpacks and various other player modifications that are dumb and don’t play well at all, like Sprint and Evade and Armor Lock, which take you halfway across any map in a few taps of your left bumper, or make you immune to all damage for slightly longer than forever.

And unlike past entries in the series, MLG has not come to the rescue. Their settings are a joke, which include some of the worst features in Reach. Their map designers, who I sort of feel bad for since they have to use Forge World, have totally stopped trying—they’re all bad. The community is essentially desolate at this point: almost all the original big names from the earlier entries have moved on in their lives, as have the people with the intelligence to play better video games.

And this is the opposite of hogwash, mind you. This is all coming from a former Halo lover; I spent what must amount to 100% of my developing years playing Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. Despite the poorly formulated complaints I had with the game at that time, I continued to play them because, honestly, the games were still pretty fun. On top of that, I always imagined that the next in the series would be better. Then I realized that that wasn’t happening. Something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe, I thought a few months ago, Bungie just isn’t any good at making video games.

There is overwhelming evidence of every type that each game in the series has been worse than the previous. And statements by the developers that explicitly say some of the best things about the original were not intended lead me to believe that their original success was, also, not intended. Their true game creating ability can be seen in the later games, which they did not apparently make any mistakes developing. According to them.

Bungie has said they are working on something that isn’t Halo related and that they have passed the franchise on to 343 Studios, which is rumored to be working on a Halo: Combat Evolved remake. As for Bungie’s next game: I’m confident it will be bad. Save your money, and spare your heart from breaking, Halo fans.

Introducing: The Ugly Swallow (v2)

Greetings, jerks. And by jerks I mean friends since it will mainly be people that are already aware of my existence reading the things I write on this space.

Those same people are probably aware that I once regularly wrote another blog by this name—hence the v2—focused primarily on politics and current events. This will be different. There will still be a light mix of that stuff, but not nearly as much—which might be because I don’t plan on posting five things a day (fingers crossed). This space will be more oriented towards things that, hopefully, have taken slightly more effort to formulate into an interesting read than that which is required to make what Sarah Palin mouthed unintelligibly into a camera be funny—the answer is nothing, sometimes accompanied with an anus joke. This will include a broad array of things: economics, video games, items of culture, your mom, etc.

As you can see, this is a Tumblr, which I’ve chosen to use for a few reasons.

A) It’s stupid-easy to use. Like, somehow easier to use than a Wordpress install.

B) I will no longer have access to free hosting shortly, and that is too expensive for a meager blogger’s salary of, roughly, one farthing.

C) I enjoy subjecting myself to incorrect accusations of hypocrisy. Tumblr doesn’t suck, but a lot of people who use it engage in sucky, uninteresting, and redundant blogging. Re: your Facebook feed. A + B - A = Tumblr sucks. QED.

With that said, hopefully this space allows for a more interesting forum in which I can more thoroughly expand on some ideas in the old noggin, and, just as importantly, give me a fun place to write.

Prepare for anything, expect nothing.