A New Center? [Politics] [Wishful Thinking]

I was reading somewhere (here) that "swing voters" in USA are not temperamentally moderate. They may have a bunch of strong left opinions and also a bunch of strong right opinions.

It's almost more like, you're trying to create a big voter bloc that can be pandered to, just as voter blocs like teachers and police are pandered to today, kinda, right?

[Wishful Thinking]

Possibly-self-fulfilling-prophecy [LW · GW] warning!

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I like this a lot and I think it’s worth serious effort to research some of the assumptions and obvious failure points (brought up by others here, although I think half of them are not addressing the core of your proposal)

Political polarization in the USA has been increasing for decades, and has become quite severe. This may have a variety of causes, but it seems highly probable that the internet has played a large role, by facilitating the toxoplasma of rage to an unprecedented degree.

Contra the idea that the internet is to blame, polarization seems historically to be the "natural" state in both the USA and elsewhere. To get less of it you need specific mechanism that have a moderating effect.

For a long time in the US this was a combination of progressive Republicans (Whigs and abolitionists) and regressive Democrats (Dixiecrats) that caused neither major party to be able to form especially polarized policy positions. Once the Civil Rights Act and Roe v. Wade drove Dixiecrats out of the Democratic party and progressives out of the Republican party, respectively, the parties became able to align more on policy.

So extending this observation, rather than a new center, maybe what we need to get less polarization is something to hold the parties together along some line that's orthogonal to policy preferences such that both parties must tolerate a wide range of opinions. I'm not sure how to do that, as the above situation was created by the Civil War and Reconstruction that made variously the Republican and Democrat parties unacceptable to certain voters (like former slaveholders and abolitionists) and it was only after a hundred years that identification with or against the "Party of Lincoln" melted away enough to allow a shift.

Maybe your new center idea could cause this, but I'm not reading in it a strong enough coordination mechanism to overcome the nature tendency for parties to align in opposite directions.

Having extreme political opinion is unfortunately correlated with being politically engaged. A majority of the people who don't have extreme opinions aren't engaged enough for a project like this. Even in the general population a majority doesn't vote in primaries. 

I would expect that it makes more sense to focus on voting reform in individual states then to build up such a pesudo party.

Meta level: strong upvote, because I strongly endorse this kind of thinking (actionable-ish, focused on coordination problems); I am also very excited that we are now showing signs of being able to tackle politics reliably without tripping over our traditional taboo.

Object level: I wonder if you'd consider revising your position on the not-a-party point. Referring to your comment else-thread: 

Instead, the proposal is to organize a legible voting bloc. More like "environmentalists" than "the green party".

Environmentalists are a movement, and not an organization; the proposal is for an organization. They are a single-topic group that tackles a narrow range of policies; the proposal shows no intention of isolating itself to a narrow range of policies.

What you have proposed is an organization which will recruit voters, establish consensus within the organization on a broad range of policies, with the goal of increasing their power as voters, and you intend to compete directly with the two major parties in their values. Finally, there are no environmentalist kingmaker organizations precisely because there are lots of environmental organizations, which means the positions of individual environmental organizations are not particularly meaningful in elections; this means the organization will need to compete with, or co-opt voters from, other organizations with similar values/goals.

I put it to you that the most natural fit for what you are proposing is a new political party which chooses not to put candidates on the ballot.

This is an ingenious strategy, in my view: by not advancing candidates, the organization is liberated from the focus on winning campaigns, and it is the focus on winning campaigns that drives most of the crappy behavior from the major parties.  At the same time, creating a legible block of voters does a marvelous job of avoiding direct competition while capitalizing on the short-term incentives direct competition creates.

This looks to me very much like a political party that takes the short-term hit of not directly holding office in exchange for the freedom to place longer-term bets on values and policy overall.  As you observed with third-party viability, winning office is unlikely and so not even trying is not much of a hit, and the potential upside is big.

It's tempting to try to reinvent the wheel, but this dynamic is by no means new. There have been viable political alternatives popping in the middle in various places around the world. Not as many as those emerging from the right or from the left,  One can argue that the US is unique in many ways, and it sure is, but the degree of uniqueness would only become clear once you identify the common trends. 

From what I understand, the process of emergence of a centrist party is usually by one of the mainstream parties not being radical enough for a large chunk of its base, splitting the party in two, one more extreme and one more centrist. It happened in Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy and many other places. The odds of creating a centrist political force from scratch are not good, and require much shallow equilibria than those in most de facto two-party systems.  For example, the Israel Resilience Party was created in 2018 on the multi-party background and many years of political gridlock.

What values are exclusively centrist?

I have two thoughts on this:

1. It seems to me that a winner-take-all election for an immensely powerful head of the executive branch of the government necessarily creates a two-party system (or something similar to a two-party system, as has happened in Germany), even if you ignore all other issues. Since there is no general feeling that having a powerful president is inherently problematic, there will not be a strong third party.
2. It's not entirely clear to me what concrete positions a hypothetical center party would take. The two parties aren't that far apart, if you ignore identity politics issues. One party wants taxes a bit higher, the other wants taxes a bit lower, but they're not that far apart. One party wants basic health insurance to be governed by legislation, the other by the free market, but they're both pretty similar ideas. There is no room for a center party because there is no space between the two parties, regardless of how angry they are at each other. In fact, the anger might be an example of narcissism of small differences, where the two sides are so angry at each other precisely because they hold similar positions, and need other ways to differentiate themselves. Hence, to focus on nonsensical issues like trying to ban people from bathrooms, or complaining about Dr. Seuss.