Maybe he should’ve helped design a political system that doesn’t inevitably lead to a two party system.
Of all of his failings, I don’t think you can really blame that one on him. His time had to balance an alliance of states that had really wanted to be a confederacy with reestablishing (small r) republicanism for the first meaningful time beyond the city-state level in two thousand years.
There’s going to be some misses.
Hmm, but who should we blame then? Our two headed oligarchy is nearly the worst possible attempt at a democracy amongst the developed world and yet it was designed to be as difficult as possible to improve or replace.
Of all the problems the US has, our lack of a functioning democracy is by the most frustrating.
Time itself and modern fascism?
It’s not super surprising that the first modern attempt at federal democracy would have some bad takes, but no system can function when half of the people in it are bad faith actors.
Does the small r go on reestablishing or republican 🤔
It’s a small r because they didn’t want to share freedom with the hard r
Fun fact. George Washington died of bloodletting, despite the practice being largely relegated to the dustbin of history centuries beforehand.
The man was not particularly forward thinking.
It’s unfortunate that the US founding fathers were well educated, but from a time 200 years before Game Theory was understood.
Duverger’s Law says that in a first-past-the-post system, you’ll eventually end up with 2 political parties. And, 2 political parties is a terrible state for a country.
Also, you’re eventually going to get political parties even if you try to ban them. They’ll just become “clubs” or something. A group of people agreeing to act together (say a union) is always going to have more power than a bunch of people acting individually.
I would hope that any country thinking of creating a new political system, or making major updates to theirs would hire a lot of game theorists to figure out how the rules could be abused and what the system might look like in 250 years.
And that’s the thing many people don’t seem to get: the US is not a 2 party system by design – there are actually many parties in the US, including Green, Libertarian, Constitution, Forward, No Labels, Working Families, Alliance, etc, many of which have been on the national ticket. Darrell Castle (Constitution Party) was on the presidential ballot in 2016, for example (I included him in a satirical anti-trump graphic I made in 2016).
The problem isn’t a lack of parties, but that the mathematics of FPTP means they literally can’t gain purchase. If you want 3rd parties to matter, instead of protest* voting or abstaining, start working towards replacing FPTP now for future elections. These conversations only seem to happen in autumn of an election year, which is far too late.
Put your effort into something like FairVote Action so we don’t have to deal with this nonsense forever.
e:*
By design, the US was supposed to be an actual plutocracy where only wealthy white men were allowed to vote or run for office. The US was designed to be many times worse than it currently is so honestly we are doing Washington a huge kindness by pretending like he wasn’t a a racist, sexist, elitist piece of shit that made it illegal for women, people of color, and the working poor (renters) to vote.
Yeah, with the current system, the only real hope for a major third party is for one of the major parties to split. Because any small third party just eats up the votes of the major party closest to its position. But, big parties only tend to split when they face major electoral defeats and there’s a lot of infighting. That means that not only did they lose, but now due to being split, they’re not even an effective opposition, and the other major party wins more easily than ever. (Which tends to lead to complacency and corruption, which tends to lead to eventual electoral defeats, once the other party gets its act together…)
And then there’s the problem that the only people who have the possible power to pass electoral reform belong to one of the two major parties, and it’s completely against the interest of those major parties to get rid of FPTP, because FPTP locks in their duopoly. That’s why, for example, when the Canadian Liberal party promised to get rid of FPTP, they abandoned that promise as soon as they were in power.
Maybe reform is possible because people are human, they don’t always optimize for the perfect win in a game. But, game theory says that it’s going to be a major uphill battle to pass any kind of reform.
How could you not have a FPTP system in America? Your voting for a president, person with most votes wins, I know electoral college is involved but they should get rid of that.
Veritasium did a great presentation on the different voting systems and there really isn’t a perfect one, but first past the post is definitely not even close to the “best”.
Since I don’t like Veritasium, I’ll suggest the CGPGrey videos:
Veritasium didn’t really give the full picture though. He was only really looking at rated based voting systems, but there are more systems out there than that.
It should be pointed out Duverger’s law really only applies to the US because the electoral college system make it fragile to third parties. Many countries with FPTP still have large 3rd parties (such as Canada)
Many countries with FPTP still have large 3rd parties
The “law” says that 2 main parties tend to emerge. In Canada only once has the prime minister ever come from a party other than the Liberals or the Conservatives. That was in 1917 when the main issue was conscription, and the pro-conscription “Union” party won over the anti-conscription Liberals. It’s pretty clear that in Canadian politics there are 2 main parties, and a few other parties that cling to survival.
Occasionally one of the parties ends up imploding, but Duverger’s Law is so strong that normally it’s only a short time before the duopoly is re-established. In Canada, Brian Mulroney and his party were so unpopular that it caused the Reform Party to form from disaffected conservatives. That meant that in the 1993 election the “Progressive Conservative” party managed only 2 seats in the federal election. But, 10 years later, the rift was healed and once again the Conservative party was the main opposition. Then the Liberals self-destructed and very briefly the NDP was the official opposition, but a few years later Justin Trudeau took the Liberals to a huge victory.
Sure, it’s better to have a third party with a few seats than it is to have no third party at all. But, I’d hardly say that events in Canada disprove Duverger’s law. In fact, they tend to support it. In more than 150 years, despite everything, the two main parties are essentially the two main parties from 150 years ago.
Canada disproves Duverger’s outright. The law doesn’t say ‘there will only be two parties that negotiate a PM position’. The 3 parties of canada all have regional strongholds and a variety of powerful positions.
The only powerful position the NDP had was since the last election when they had to form a minority government. Other then they even the opposition has no power.
I would argue the premier of BC is a fairly powerful position. Especially since, regionally, the NDP or Liberal party have been in contention for BC since the early 90s- over 30 years.
I would say that duverger’s is “true-ish” but it doesn’t capture the correct mechanism and fails on a predictive level enough that it at least should not be called a “law”.
Its almost certainly suggests what’s going on has more to do with voters gamifying their elections rather than any tendency of the elections or parties themselves as canada shows you have people voting liberal for country level government and NDP for regional seats.
A true successor to Duverger’s Law would state that ftpt has a tendency to cause voters to vote strategically among the two most dominant parties in any fptp election. This would be more in line with what we actually see.
I too prefer George Washington as seen through a cathode ray tube.
This was less important to him than making sure only wealthy, educated, white men could vote. The unwashed masses were never intended to vote on anything federal beyond House of Representatives.
Exactly. If you’re reading this, you aren’t the person he wanted involved in running the country.
Maybe instead of jerking off old dead white guys, we could do something now.
A 2 party system is half away from fascism where one only party exists…
The 2-party system isn’t really two national parties. It’s two regional parties that grapple for power at the federal level. Thanks to modern mathematical models for ideal gerrymandering, combined with an arbitrarily sized Congressional system and an election finance system dripping in outright campaign bribery, you end up with states where one party is fully controlled by the local industry magnets and the other is utterly non-viable as opposition.
That’s why you have arch-conservatives like Eric Adams and Kristin Sinema running (and winning) under the Democrat banner in NYC and newly blue Arizona while mushy liberal democrats like Mitt Romney and Kay Granger have to run as Republicans in bright red Utah and Texas.
It only gets worse at the State level, where districts can be drawn in such a curious fashion as to guarantee a majority in a given chamber with less than 40% of the popular vote (as is the case in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Texas). We have a minority majority government across much of the US interior territory, with seats effectively guaranteed by the committees that sketch the districts and the mega-donors that bankroll the campaigns and run the local media institutions.
If you’re wondering why fascism is bleeding through the cracks of the American system, this is a good place to investigate first.
For USA (and most of western countries) I have the prejudice that are effective plutocracies (where wealth is not only liquid money in the bank) disguised of democracies, the more is only dual the polarisation the higher the control of the wealthy
My favorite fact about George Washington was how he was born, fully grown, and on his horse.
Well, he didn’t just argue against a two party system, but political parties in general.
He also said we must avoid entangling alliances and look where Israel has got us
Honestly after I found out about the history of my country, I was surprised we aren’t more friendly with France and more anti-british. France supported us during the revolution and gifted us the 🗽.
Oh boy another thread where we get to debate third parties
Washington was referring to any political parties, as well as foreign influencers. It may be difficult in a fast paced sound bite world, but debating core ideas and solutions themselves should be what we do, not this sports politics where single words become the shouted arguments. I listen to some talk shows where the callers are shut down all because the host will ask them what they mean by the word or phrase they use as a rebuttal, and they don’t know what it means at all, only that they heard/read it somewhere and it sounded good. “Woke” is a great one, and one I often see online here too.
This is the same guy that fought a war to preserve slavery.
What? The closest thing to an abolition of slavery by British authorities was Dunmore’s Proclamation which was proclaimed well after the Revolution had turned into open war. The American Revolution wasn’t motivated by any real or perceived threat to the institution of slavery.
