I think both you and Mounk overstate the problems with proportional representation, Noah, but I grant that the problems you both point out are enormously complicated, and that in a historical moment where both the lack of common culture and the overabundance of technologically and economically motivated distinctions and grievances creates a passion for extremes, there are no obvious solutions. (Of course, the localists and autarkists and municipalists and Anti-Federalists have/had one: smaller, less regionally and bureaucratically and ideologically expansive and/or obligated states. Maybe all the problems entwined with both majoritarian and proportional systems electoral are ultimately connected to Madison's extended vision of a pluralistic democratic republic; so, get rid of that?)
So you think we should cease to be a democratic republic? Or cease to be pluralistic (whatever that means)? Or are you just saying "keep shrinking the political units until there's a natural consensus?" If so, how small are we talking? And what happens when, thanks to demographic, technological, economic, geopolitical or other change, the consensus evaporates and the formerly homogeneous community is now riven by faction?
History isn't going to stop, and there is no political design that is impregnable against history.
"So you think we should cease to be a democratic republic?"
Well, the Anti-Federalists definitely wouldn't have agreed with that, and assuming we mean the same thing by a "democratic republic" (popular sovereignty, government by consent through representative elections, etc.), then I don't either.
"Or cease to be pluralistic (whatever that means)?"
In this case, referring explicitly to Madison's concern with factions, then yes, sort of, in the sense of attempting to construct a democratic polity where the causes for factions hopefully don't multiply quite so rapidly or (as is too often the case) vindictively.
"Or are you just saying 'keep shrinking the political units until there's a natural consensus?' If so, how small are we talking? And what happens when, thanks to demographic, technological, economic, geopolitical or other change, the consensus evaporates and the formerly homogeneous community is now riven by faction?"
Hard questions that I have no answer to (in the same way, I note, that neither you nor Mounk have answers to the problems you both sketch out). I would say, though, that your use of "consensus" takes my comment in a direction that I'm not sure it necessarily needs to go. The groups I through out in my original comments, both past and present, sometimes made or make a fetish of consensus, but not usually, at least on my reading; their goal, I think, rather was and is democratic legitimacy, decision-making that can be both effective and tolerable to those who dissent, because there is a political culture which grounds some level of basic acceptance within the normal operating terms of the government and elections, etc., in question. Rousseau's warning that things can get too big for anything like that to be sustained has never been entirely responded to, I think.
And what would be that broad and stable center? For countries like France and Germany, as with most other major nations, there is no historical definition of anything like one. They were all cobbled together over long periods of time by varying combinations of human inhabitants, and if they do have a central historical theme, it is some form of authoritarianism, most often a monarchy.
We are the exception. We are a deliberate creation, put into place in one historical moment by a group of successful agriculturalists, lawyers, ministers, intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen all locked in a summer-hot room in the Pennsylvania State house. (Lord, one can only wonder what the place must have smelled like). Within the combination of fine words, noble sentiments, a pretty good understanding of human nature, and some very hard-headed political realities lies one idea - that “We the People’ might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the humility, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with sufficient justice and equality of being.
Granted that we were created with a massive internal contradiction - slavery in a "nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.- and a distribution of the franchise to only half of the citizen class, But the promise of our founding remains extraordinary, and, while as yet unfulfilled, we have corrected those two issues at least.
Am I, even with nearly 80 years under my increasingly long belt, an unrepentant American idealist and ‘a cockeyed optimist'. Yes, resoundingly. But as an American, what else can one be. We are both the inheritors and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted. What else but a rich dollop of idealism will keep the experiment in motion?
Mr. Millman seems entirely correct in his assumption that in order to function at all in this present moment, nations must try to deal and to compromise with each’s own international political variations and contradictions. And given our global interconnectedness and our relatively new capacity to turn the whole house into a radioactive cinder, we also have to deal with each other’s.
My idealism does not trump my sense of reality. My college major was Anthropology with a specialty in human origins and evolution, and I’ve spent over 40 of my nearly 80 years teaching American history and dabbling in world history on my own. I’ve got a pretty good idea who we are and where we’ve been, including our long evolutionary and pre-historic journey, bits and pieces of which we are still uncovering.
But as an American, as an inheritor and a participant in that great experiment, I remain hopeful that enough of us who did not see or understand the risk involved in Trump’s utter disdain for all that we were meant to be, will come to see that risk as he ravages our Constitution and our nation in pursuit of his own lust for power and control. Indeed, my only real regret is that I’m unlikely to live to see whatever emerges from this latest testing.
I can't help thinking of those polls that say that partisans of each party (in the US, no idea whether this holds elsewhere) believe that partisans of the other party are much more ideologically extreme than they actually are.
That is to ask: how much of our instability and polarization and so on is caused by real, versus perceived, irreconcilable differences in values?
This argument makes complete sense to me. As energy flows, centrifugal force tends to pull the middle apart. The energy is at the edges of the spectrum. The activists x digital amplification x foreign agitation = extreme pulling force. It makes sense that the established center cannot hold. As it became evident that the Titanic would sink - passengers either clung to the ship or jumped into the sea to find a lifeboat. Moderates will be forced from comfortable centrism by the realization that the old World Order has struck iceberg - and that the West is taking on water fast. They will join one extreme voice or the other. This pattern of social immolation appears to be the death rattle of world orders every 80-100 years as restive citizens militate for radical change. The old thing has been commandeered by the rich and powerful leaving too many fighting for too little. Just as in the 1930s after the ‘29 crash. That’s the last time such fascists + socialists tore apart democracy that failed them.
I would disagree somewhat with Noah's conclusion that Labour in the UK had a very poor popular showing. If you take Labour's share of the vote plus that of the Lib Dems and Greens(plus various left regionalist movements) you basically get to an equal share of the vote to that of Reform+Tory. I think the bigger problem is that even a traditional two part majoritarian system the system really isn't setup to handle 50/50 vote splits. As I think we are about to see in the US House of Representatives even in majoritarian legislatures a 3 seat majority out of 435 is basically worthless(and might actually be worse than being in the minority).
The one cavaet of course is one can say that there have been past attempts at LibDem-Labour cooperation that have failed to materialize while Reform-Tory cooperation would be something new. Then again perhaps a Reform-Tory merger is what will finally pushed a Labour-LibDem merger over the finish line.
Labour won less than 34% of the popular vote and more than 65% of the seats. If that's not a landslide electoral outcome on the basis of a poor popular vote showing, then nothing is. It's practically a defining case. In 1997, Tony Blair won a roughly similar number of seats with 43% of the vote, and the Lib-Dems took a substantially larger percentage of the vote in that election than in 2024 (nearly 17% versus just over 12%).
Trump won 49.5% of the vote in the US. The Tories+Reform(along with the DUP and other small right wing parties) won only 39% with the rest of the public voting for Labour and Labour allied parties. Hence Starmer has a bigger mandate than Trump.
The combined Labour-Lib Dem-Green share of the vote on its own gets you over 50% and in excess of Trump's "smashing" 49.5% victory.
It is true that if you add Labour's vote together with other parties that were running against them, you can get to a total that is roughly similar to Trump's total. The significance of that to my actual argument escapes me, however. I don't remember saying anything about Trump's mandate, or Starmer's, or about mandates of any kind. So far as I can tell, they have nothing whatsoever to do with my argument.
I did make the statement, as part of my argument, that Labour had a "very poor popular vote showing" relative the their seat total, and that a key reason they got so many seats with so few votes is that the vote on the right split in a historically unusual way. This is simply a fact, one that many people who commented on the election noted at the time. So I'm really not sure what this argument is about.
So I'm a total ignoramus when it comes to politics, but I just can't understand the thinking on this. Presumably, the center-left political leaders understand the situation more or less as you do, and realize that this passport control issue could end up giving AfD a seat in the governing coalition. Why can't they negotiate with CDU to accept that issue to form a centrist coalition to box out AfD? Do they prefer seeing AfD as part of a governing coalition to compromising on showing passports at the border?
The establishment's refusal to compromise on *any* core values in the face of rapidly shifting popular sentiment indicates to me one of two things. Either those core values are all bullshit (i.e., it has no utility if I am not in power), or they intend to pursue those core values at the expense of liberal democracy.
I don't fully understand your first alternative -- if the values were bullshit, why wouldn't they just jettison them whenever they prove a political liability?
In a scenario where you have a long list of things you want and a rapidly diminishing probability of getting everything on that list, the rational choice would be to jettison part of the list in the interest of preserving the part you value most, or at least the part of it that you can. That is the definition of compromise. If, however, you jettison the whole list because you cannot have it all, then I cannot believe that you cared much for any part of it to begin with.
This is precisely what I think happened in the US elections this year. The Democratic party chose defeat over compromise (with its own electorate, mind you). In doing so, the party betrayed the portion of its purported "core values" that could have been salvaged under a compromise with the left, and Donald Trump now stands to subvert the whole of their core values, or so the Democrats would have us believe, at least. Now tell me, how much can the Democrats truly believe in any of these "core values"?
In the US, the electoral system makes it much easier for the major parties to be totally morally and ideologically bankrupt. Everyone can see it, but it's still practically impossible for a third party that might offer something new to even get a toe-hold. If the Democrats lose this cycle, they have reason to be confident that the pendulum will swing back, regardless of what "core values" they purport to defend. In Europe, however, where the barriers are lower and the ebb and flow of parties is more fluid, the establishment parties have been markedly more combative. However, rather than presenting a viable vision for their "core values", or some compromise, they have chosen to subvert the very democracy that would threaten their stay in power.
Very interesting discussion about why it's hard for the "center" to hold.
Also, I'm pleased to learn more about the situation in several European countries, and in particular the CDU's dilemma about Schengen.
So, thank you.
I think both you and Mounk overstate the problems with proportional representation, Noah, but I grant that the problems you both point out are enormously complicated, and that in a historical moment where both the lack of common culture and the overabundance of technologically and economically motivated distinctions and grievances creates a passion for extremes, there are no obvious solutions. (Of course, the localists and autarkists and municipalists and Anti-Federalists have/had one: smaller, less regionally and bureaucratically and ideologically expansive and/or obligated states. Maybe all the problems entwined with both majoritarian and proportional systems electoral are ultimately connected to Madison's extended vision of a pluralistic democratic republic; so, get rid of that?)
So you think we should cease to be a democratic republic? Or cease to be pluralistic (whatever that means)? Or are you just saying "keep shrinking the political units until there's a natural consensus?" If so, how small are we talking? And what happens when, thanks to demographic, technological, economic, geopolitical or other change, the consensus evaporates and the formerly homogeneous community is now riven by faction?
History isn't going to stop, and there is no political design that is impregnable against history.
"So you think we should cease to be a democratic republic?"
Well, the Anti-Federalists definitely wouldn't have agreed with that, and assuming we mean the same thing by a "democratic republic" (popular sovereignty, government by consent through representative elections, etc.), then I don't either.
"Or cease to be pluralistic (whatever that means)?"
In this case, referring explicitly to Madison's concern with factions, then yes, sort of, in the sense of attempting to construct a democratic polity where the causes for factions hopefully don't multiply quite so rapidly or (as is too often the case) vindictively.
"Or are you just saying 'keep shrinking the political units until there's a natural consensus?' If so, how small are we talking? And what happens when, thanks to demographic, technological, economic, geopolitical or other change, the consensus evaporates and the formerly homogeneous community is now riven by faction?"
Hard questions that I have no answer to (in the same way, I note, that neither you nor Mounk have answers to the problems you both sketch out). I would say, though, that your use of "consensus" takes my comment in a direction that I'm not sure it necessarily needs to go. The groups I through out in my original comments, both past and present, sometimes made or make a fetish of consensus, but not usually, at least on my reading; their goal, I think, rather was and is democratic legitimacy, decision-making that can be both effective and tolerable to those who dissent, because there is a political culture which grounds some level of basic acceptance within the normal operating terms of the government and elections, etc., in question. Rousseau's warning that things can get too big for anything like that to be sustained has never been entirely responded to, I think.
And what would be that broad and stable center? For countries like France and Germany, as with most other major nations, there is no historical definition of anything like one. They were all cobbled together over long periods of time by varying combinations of human inhabitants, and if they do have a central historical theme, it is some form of authoritarianism, most often a monarchy.
We are the exception. We are a deliberate creation, put into place in one historical moment by a group of successful agriculturalists, lawyers, ministers, intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen all locked in a summer-hot room in the Pennsylvania State house. (Lord, one can only wonder what the place must have smelled like). Within the combination of fine words, noble sentiments, a pretty good understanding of human nature, and some very hard-headed political realities lies one idea - that “We the People’ might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the humility, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with sufficient justice and equality of being.
Granted that we were created with a massive internal contradiction - slavery in a "nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.- and a distribution of the franchise to only half of the citizen class, But the promise of our founding remains extraordinary, and, while as yet unfulfilled, we have corrected those two issues at least.
Am I, even with nearly 80 years under my increasingly long belt, an unrepentant American idealist and ‘a cockeyed optimist'. Yes, resoundingly. But as an American, what else can one be. We are both the inheritors and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted. What else but a rich dollop of idealism will keep the experiment in motion?
Mr. Millman seems entirely correct in his assumption that in order to function at all in this present moment, nations must try to deal and to compromise with each’s own international political variations and contradictions. And given our global interconnectedness and our relatively new capacity to turn the whole house into a radioactive cinder, we also have to deal with each other’s.
My idealism does not trump my sense of reality. My college major was Anthropology with a specialty in human origins and evolution, and I’ve spent over 40 of my nearly 80 years teaching American history and dabbling in world history on my own. I’ve got a pretty good idea who we are and where we’ve been, including our long evolutionary and pre-historic journey, bits and pieces of which we are still uncovering.
But as an American, as an inheritor and a participant in that great experiment, I remain hopeful that enough of us who did not see or understand the risk involved in Trump’s utter disdain for all that we were meant to be, will come to see that risk as he ravages our Constitution and our nation in pursuit of his own lust for power and control. Indeed, my only real regret is that I’m unlikely to live to see whatever emerges from this latest testing.
I can't help thinking of those polls that say that partisans of each party (in the US, no idea whether this holds elsewhere) believe that partisans of the other party are much more ideologically extreme than they actually are.
That is to ask: how much of our instability and polarization and so on is caused by real, versus perceived, irreconcilable differences in values?
This argument makes complete sense to me. As energy flows, centrifugal force tends to pull the middle apart. The energy is at the edges of the spectrum. The activists x digital amplification x foreign agitation = extreme pulling force. It makes sense that the established center cannot hold. As it became evident that the Titanic would sink - passengers either clung to the ship or jumped into the sea to find a lifeboat. Moderates will be forced from comfortable centrism by the realization that the old World Order has struck iceberg - and that the West is taking on water fast. They will join one extreme voice or the other. This pattern of social immolation appears to be the death rattle of world orders every 80-100 years as restive citizens militate for radical change. The old thing has been commandeered by the rich and powerful leaving too many fighting for too little. Just as in the 1930s after the ‘29 crash. That’s the last time such fascists + socialists tore apart democracy that failed them.
I would disagree somewhat with Noah's conclusion that Labour in the UK had a very poor popular showing. If you take Labour's share of the vote plus that of the Lib Dems and Greens(plus various left regionalist movements) you basically get to an equal share of the vote to that of Reform+Tory. I think the bigger problem is that even a traditional two part majoritarian system the system really isn't setup to handle 50/50 vote splits. As I think we are about to see in the US House of Representatives even in majoritarian legislatures a 3 seat majority out of 435 is basically worthless(and might actually be worse than being in the minority).
The one cavaet of course is one can say that there have been past attempts at LibDem-Labour cooperation that have failed to materialize while Reform-Tory cooperation would be something new. Then again perhaps a Reform-Tory merger is what will finally pushed a Labour-LibDem merger over the finish line.
Labour won less than 34% of the popular vote and more than 65% of the seats. If that's not a landslide electoral outcome on the basis of a poor popular vote showing, then nothing is. It's practically a defining case. In 1997, Tony Blair won a roughly similar number of seats with 43% of the vote, and the Lib-Dems took a substantially larger percentage of the vote in that election than in 2024 (nearly 17% versus just over 12%).
Trump won 49.5% of the vote in the US. The Tories+Reform(along with the DUP and other small right wing parties) won only 39% with the rest of the public voting for Labour and Labour allied parties. Hence Starmer has a bigger mandate than Trump.
The combined Labour-Lib Dem-Green share of the vote on its own gets you over 50% and in excess of Trump's "smashing" 49.5% victory.
It is true that if you add Labour's vote together with other parties that were running against them, you can get to a total that is roughly similar to Trump's total. The significance of that to my actual argument escapes me, however. I don't remember saying anything about Trump's mandate, or Starmer's, or about mandates of any kind. So far as I can tell, they have nothing whatsoever to do with my argument.
I did make the statement, as part of my argument, that Labour had a "very poor popular vote showing" relative the their seat total, and that a key reason they got so many seats with so few votes is that the vote on the right split in a historically unusual way. This is simply a fact, one that many people who commented on the election noted at the time. So I'm really not sure what this argument is about.
If you think I'm making a metaphysical argument about the "realness" of anyone's victory, I encourage you to re-read my piece, because I am not.
So I'm a total ignoramus when it comes to politics, but I just can't understand the thinking on this. Presumably, the center-left political leaders understand the situation more or less as you do, and realize that this passport control issue could end up giving AfD a seat in the governing coalition. Why can't they negotiate with CDU to accept that issue to form a centrist coalition to box out AfD? Do they prefer seeing AfD as part of a governing coalition to compromising on showing passports at the border?
Because it would run totally contrary to a core value of theirs, for one thing.
So they prefer AfD getting a seat in the governing coalition to compromising on that value?
I think they view it as a Hobson's choice and are paralyzed. In some sense the whole liberal-democratic world is like that these days.
Yes
The establishment's refusal to compromise on *any* core values in the face of rapidly shifting popular sentiment indicates to me one of two things. Either those core values are all bullshit (i.e., it has no utility if I am not in power), or they intend to pursue those core values at the expense of liberal democracy.
I don't fully understand your first alternative -- if the values were bullshit, why wouldn't they just jettison them whenever they prove a political liability?
In a scenario where you have a long list of things you want and a rapidly diminishing probability of getting everything on that list, the rational choice would be to jettison part of the list in the interest of preserving the part you value most, or at least the part of it that you can. That is the definition of compromise. If, however, you jettison the whole list because you cannot have it all, then I cannot believe that you cared much for any part of it to begin with.
This is precisely what I think happened in the US elections this year. The Democratic party chose defeat over compromise (with its own electorate, mind you). In doing so, the party betrayed the portion of its purported "core values" that could have been salvaged under a compromise with the left, and Donald Trump now stands to subvert the whole of their core values, or so the Democrats would have us believe, at least. Now tell me, how much can the Democrats truly believe in any of these "core values"?
In the US, the electoral system makes it much easier for the major parties to be totally morally and ideologically bankrupt. Everyone can see it, but it's still practically impossible for a third party that might offer something new to even get a toe-hold. If the Democrats lose this cycle, they have reason to be confident that the pendulum will swing back, regardless of what "core values" they purport to defend. In Europe, however, where the barriers are lower and the ebb and flow of parties is more fluid, the establishment parties have been markedly more combative. However, rather than presenting a viable vision for their "core values", or some compromise, they have chosen to subvert the very democracy that would threaten their stay in power.