Kill the mind-killer

People who participate in a political system will usually find it to their advantage to form alliances. Since the incentive is there, if the formal trappings of political parties are prohibited, this will only result in such alliances existing in informal ways (much like suppressing the market economy results in an underground economy immediately springing up). This is true for all political systems except pure autocracies and perhaps small oligarchies that are tightly-knit enough to operate with general consensus.

The U.S. founders generally had a negative view of political parties and were hoping to design a republican system that wouldn't have them. (Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10 is representative of this attitude.) Yet they completely failed, with the first party system appearing almost immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. Considering that the Founders were less delusional and ignorant about government than almost anyone who is studying politics today, and that they had something much closer to the blank slate to work with, their failure should be a convincing demonstration of the impracticability of the idea.

Besides all that, the real problem, of course, is that electoral politics is overall much less relevant than people imagine. Laws are today normally created by unelected professional bureaucracies and (to a lesser degree) judicial precedents, with legislatures providing only vague suggestions. The notions of "rulemaking" and "Chevron deference" are probably not discussed in the civics textbooks, but they are far more relevant for how government actually works than all the political theater on the TV.

The budget stalemate in the US Congress was caused entirely by blocks of voters and representatives that coalesced around strong sets of opinions that few people would have come up with on their own, and by political party leaders forcing representatives in their parties to toe the party line. Politics isn't the mind killer. Political parties are the mind-killer.

Why are we assuming the "budget stalemate in the US Congress" is a problem that needs solving? What kind of evidence do you have access to that allows you to conclude that something as complicated as this is "caused entirely by" anything?

Also, the fact you didn't check the literature on political parties before coming up with your own "solution" to the "problem" is weak confirming evidence that politics is still the mind-killer. I don't think politics should be banned on Less Wrong, but if we are going to discuss it it would be wise to start at a fundamental level rather than with a contemporary policy debate.

A lot of these problems are problems with political parties operating in the context of the American system of government. Genuinely multi-party parliaments don't have the same problems.

People have freedom of association and freedom of speech. I don't see how you can "get rid of" political parties and preserve these basic freedoms.

Also, congress's procedures aren't determined by the constitution, they are determined by congress.

Instead of suggesting you are a dreamer, I'd rather ask what your plan is. When you say "Make that illegal", who are you talking to? Is this a letter you meant to send to your congressman? I don't think this is an appropriate platform for your advocacy.

The budget stalemate in the US Congress

You seem to assume stalemate in congress is obviously a bad thing. Given that most of what congress does tends to be passing laws that help rent-seekers, I think stalemate in congress is frequently a good thing.

You could also argue that elections are the mind-killer - if the popularity of opinions among the population had little or no impact on who got in power, people wouldn't get worked up as much about them. I wonder if the republic of Venice - with it's mix of elections and random choice - had more or less factionalism than modern western societies do (I would guess it wasn't as widespread as ours, a bit like most Chinese people don't have strong political ideologies, but the educated are more likely to).

For similar reasons, you could argue that karma on lesswrong (and reddit) is a small mind-killer.

If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you'd heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise. Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.

That's because knowing party affiliation actually gives you some information about the candidate (the more parties in the election, the more information you get).

If you want to know what kind of policies candidate Joe is likely to enact, you'll probably get a better guess by looking at which policies were enacted by candidates of the same party as candidate Joe, than by listening to his speeches (which are likely to be mostly filled with platitudes and applause lights).

What about trying something other than modern one person one vote representative democracy?

I'm not sure if you intended this or not, but your discussion questions are pretty leading (the pre-determined conclusion seems like it's supposed to be that political parties are bad).

I don't think being leading is inherently bad, I just wanted to make sure you realized this fact.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it is politics that's the mind-killer. Most of the breakdown of reasoned discussion due to politics that I've seen was not due to party-loyalty in any explicit sense, but to a much broader ideology/in-group loyalty.

On the broader topic, taking your first two points in reverese order: political parties are important because one of the vital elements in a democracy is accountability. By grouping together people and approaches as a 'party' we allow the voters to judge their overall effectiveness and approach - and kick them out at elections. This is particularly important for the average not-that-committed voter, but even the most politically focused person can't actually track and judge every individual standing for office. In a similar vein, parties make it harder for someone to campaign for more spending at the same time as less taxes and so on: they produce overall positions that can be tested in greater depth for consistency. The same point applies to governments: and if you had no political parties it's difficult to see how a governing group could have enough solidity to be judged (this is less of an issue in the USA, where you have an elected executive, than in the UK where the PM is the leader of the party/coalition that controls the House of Commons).

This point about accountability is key, IMO, because I think that the 'being able to replace rulers without war' and the 'rulers fear annoying too many people' are probably more important elements of democracy than the idea that the voters are in the best position to guide a government towards good policy in any detail. So the idea that a system would encourage only the most informed to vote (if that's what you imply) is both unrealistic and unattractive. Unrealistic because the uninformed would be campaigned at by the media/candidates and believe they were informed and unattractive because if you managed to convince most people that they were outside the political proccess, the stability of democracy would be deeply damaged.

I think you have an overly idealistic idea of the state that would exist without parties: I suspect people would vote based on local adverts/leaflets which provided a lower level of information than they currently get by at least seeing what parties do in power. So I don't buy that as a disadvantage. There are disadvantages around the incentive structure for politicians being wrong (party focused rather than people focused) but I'm unconvinced there's a system that would avoid this without major other problems.

From a UK point of view, the things we tend to assume would improve US politics would be a less biased and more challenging media, and a cap on spending by political parties. i.e. what we do... But ultiamtely, I suspect that institutions have to develop with culture, and if you don't think the US political culture is working I don't think reform of the political architecture will be the main thing. Doesn't mean it's not worth considering/doing... but I'm suspicious of magic bullets.

In the current political system in the US, everything is based on voting for a representative. It's useless to vote for someone with no chance of winning, so you always end up with two parties that give their candidates.

If you allow people to vote for parties, and give congress representatives in proportion to the number of votes, you still end up with parties, but you can have many more of them, so they don't have to be as powerful. I know there are countries that do this, but I don't know which ones. Can someone from such a country tell about this?

One possibility that occurred to me a while back is to just make congress a random sample of the population. Nobody outside of congress will vote, so they won't form any sort of political party until their chosen. There will still be some party effects. For example, if congress has to appoint someone, and they vote on it, it will go back to the first case.

Parties will still be caused by normal human biases. If you get a hundred people together, they will form groups. It can at least be improved from the US system, which forces the adoption of parties.

Why would abolition of political parties make politics better? Look at politics before modern democracy and political parties. I personally can't imagine something more mind-killing than court intrigues in, say, 18th century.

forbidden...forbidden...forbidden...forbidden...Make that illegal.

Instead of suggesting you are a dreamer, I'd rather ask what your plan is.

I haven't got one. That's why this is in the Discussion section.

My problem with the proposed solution of "make that illegal" isn't that it's intellectual dreaming, it's that it's too practical and not abstract enough. Systems of people and their interactions flow in natural ways that can't be brutally criminalized into nonexistence without disturbing the whole system.

Trying to solve a problem and then patching against the solution's unintended consequences is the wrong approach, and it's one engendered by not holding off with solutions and by zooming in on the party issue.

The way I think about things, "What other disadvantages are provided by the existence of political parties?" isn't the right question. Advantages and disadvantages are relative to complete systems, and political parties are not preponderantly important as against all the other variables in the social system. Also, worlds without a particular set of laws are to be compared against worlds in which there is that set of laws: one such might be imprisonment for whipping votes, for example. Notably, one does not compare a world in which the criminalized behavior is absent, and in which all else remains static, to one in which the behavior is present.

Laws are either silly or legislating against something some people want to do (and others don't want them to do). All laws are therefore suspect, particularly when they target an amorphous and undefinable thing like politicking. People naturally want to do these things, for valid game-theoretic reasons. Punishing doing them efficiently, punishing getting caught doing them, will not end the activity or the effects of the activity.