Categories
ideological culture incumbents local leaders media and media people political challengers too much government

The Centre Cannot Hold

The British may spell their words in funny ways, but their political problems do not seem all that foreign. Their left-​of-​center party has gone far left, Marxoid left; their right-​of-​center party has gone ultra-incompetent.

A healthy majority of Brits disapprove of both parties. So, no wonder many Brits are looking to create a new one.

A new centrist political party, no less.

Over at The Economist, the columnist writing under the name “Bagehot” (pronounced “badget”) predicts that this hope will be dashed, for at least three reasons:

First, Britain already has a centrist party, and it is not doing very well.

Second, there sure are a lot of contenders — 35 new parties have been formed just this year, including one called, with humble brag, “Sensible” — and all that competition fractionalizes the vote.

Third, the country sports the same system of vote counting and elections as America does, first-​past-​the-​post, which “is hard on startups.”

That last point is worth thinking about. In multi-​candidate races, the British-​American electoral system declares as winners those who obtain a bare plurality of votes — thus ignoring the preferences of those who vote for minor party candidates. This means that those who “waste” their votes not only hurt the candidacies they like as second-​best but also insulate the second-​best parties from those voters’ influence. So the parties become narrow-​minded and unhinged from an interested group of voters.

Bagehot thinks Britain’s centrists need to rethink, conjure up some new ideas. But what they need to do first is fix a system that prods political parties away from new ideas. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism political challengers responsibility too much government

French Beacon

“Since the French Revolution,” the New York Times pontificated online, “the nation has often been viewed as a beacon of democratic ideals.”

Really? Can a nation of constitutional turnovers — kings and republics and revolutions and foreign occupation — be a beacon? Most often we in America compare our Revolution to France’s, focusing on The Terror: mob rule and proto-totalitarianism.

On Friday, “the staff of the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron said… that the campaign had been targeted by a ‘massive and coordinated’ hacking operation, one with the potential to destabilize the nation’s democracy before voters go to the polls on Sunday.” A few minutes later, the campaigns fell under the country’s election gag rule, unable to debate immediately prior to the voting. The government told the media not to look at what was dug up in the “hack” (which everybody said was by Russians). Though Macron’s putative Islamization plan is worth looking at, surely.

Much talk (at the Times and elsewhere) of how the hack destabilized democracy. No talk, for some reason, about how the election regulation gag rule did. 

The idea that information might destabilize democracy? Awkward. 

Still, we can see how an info-dump’s timing might destabilize an election.

But since Macron won by a large margin, the Late Exposure Strategy may have backfired, Russians or no.

The most obvious oddity in reportage? The continued reference to former Socialist Party hack Macron as “centrist” while Le Pen is called “far right” ad nauseam. Macron is pro-​EU; Le Pen is nationalist. Neither are reliably for freedom. The fact that Macron packaged his En Marche ! Party as centrist doesn’t make it so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Printable PDF

 

Categories
government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Reform

Going into the presidential race, last year, Donald Trump was far from a typical Republican.

His rich man braggadocio, his prior support for abortion, and much else, put him culturally at odds with the social conservative wing of the GOP. He dared heap scorn on neoconservative foreign policy strategy, sacrosanct since Reagan on the right. He has supported many Democratic programs, not the least of which is the Gephardtian protectionism that pulled in so many moderate Democrats.

Besides, as he has famously stated, Democrats loved him, asked him for money, and (not coincidentally) gave him praise … right up until he started his campaign under the Republican banner. Then he was excoriated as sexist, racist, xenophobic, Ugly Americanist. Ivanka, his eldest daughter — extraordinarily close to him — was a registered as a Democrat recently enough that she couldn’t even vote for him in the primary.

Ideologically, he has been all over the map.

So one might reasonably think he would govern as a centrist. A non-​humble Jimmy Carter retread, perhaps.

But he has assembled the most conservative cabinet in our lifetime. Far more conservative than Ronald Reagan’s. Predictably, Democrats are freaking out.

Why the move “rightward”?

Well, if all the Democratic leadership plus most of the moderate Republican leadership have come out strongly against you — in high moral dudgeon — what point is there to appease them?

The cost of the Trump anathematization strategy may become all too clear in Trump’s first Hundred Days.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Printable PDF

Trump, protest, conservative, centrist, right, illustration