Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (97788)	5/10/2003 6:45:57 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

>>Are we a single party system with two faces? << I don't think it's the parties that are so close together. I think it's the way the Congress is set up which requires either overwhelming power for one side or else close cooperation between at least two sides to have power. The littler sides, Socialism, Communism, Populism, Green, Libertarian, and so forth, have to either become part of the largest party or else part of the second largest party to get anywhere. Speaking as a Republican, there are multiple strands -- Bush is a Big Government Republican. There are Country Club Republicans, and Libertarian Republicans, and Religious Right Republicans and Paleoconservative Republicans and Neoconservative Republicans and Log Cabin Republicans (gay) and more. I know Republicans who revere Jefferson and others who hate him. I know Republicans who revere Lincoln and others who hate him. I know Libertarian Republicans and Republicans who call Libertarians "lazy fairies." I know Religious Right Republicans and Republicans who believe in separation of Church and State. Not monolithic at all.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (97788)	5/12/2003 9:30:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

Two issues here, related but different… I would have prefered to have 5 ideologically well defined parties in US instead. What do you think? Are we a single party system with two faces? I would not say that we have a single party with two faces, though at the border the distinction certainly blurs. There’s a real advantage to having two major parties with very general ideological slants, instead of a larger number of ideologically distinct parties. In a large party with a general ideological slant encompassing diverse and even contradictory factions, parties need to appeal to a range of different interests, and most of all to those swing voters along the blurred border. This forces a degree of moderation on the major parties, and makes it harder for the ideologues to grab control. This works, because most American voters, thankfully, are not ideologues, and would prefer a party with a moderate platform. The problem with parties that are ideologically well defined is that they tend to be dominated by individuals with well-defined, frequently rigid, ideologies. Since rigid ideology is incompatible with rational thought, this is not a good thing. I’ll take flexibility and compromise over ideological definition any day. In most of the developing countries that are afflicted with numerous parties, of course, the parties tend to be ideologically indistinguishable. The distinctions are more likely to be along ethnic, sectarian, or purely personal lines. From a standpoint of stability, the problem with many parties is that whoever gets elected tends to gain a fairly small percentage of the overall vote, and to have had more opponents than supporters. This leads to a legitimacy gap that can create severe instability, especially in a developing democracy with few established precedents. It’s been suggested that a parliamentary system is more appropriate to this kind of circumstance, but without a clear set of precedents and practices, this can easily lead to continuous political maneuvering, in which politicians are more concerned with the quest for position than with affairs of state. You have two Kurdish parties, one of which is more of a tribal leadership and the other is more of modernist. You have a Shia fundamentalist group and you have a Shia secular group with religious undertones. And you have Sunni group. It seems like the perfect mix to flesh out the ideas and lead to political maturity. The problem here is that this system of division will tend to break political discourse down along ethnic and sectarian lines. There are critical questions that need to be resolved. For example: should the oil industry be privatized, or kept under government control, or something in between? What foreign policies should the country adopt? What domestic economic policies outside the oil industry? If political discourse is dominated by the question of what’s best for the Shiites/Sunnis/Kurds/smaller minorities, it may be very hard to reach the question of what’s best for the nation as a whole. In the absence of such ethnic and sectarian divisions, you’d be more likely to see different parties forming. One might favor, say, a nationalized oil industry, membership in OPEC and the nonaligned movement, distance from the West, more centralized government, closer affinity with Arab regimes. Another might favor privatization, a more decentralized government structure, greater multinational participation in the economy, participation in economic globalization, and closer alignment with the west. This sort of differentiation would give much more of an ideological choice, and elections would give a much clearer idea of what sort of policies actually appeal to Iraqis. It doesn’t help that the two Kurdish groups have a history of betrayal and violent conflict behind them, or that the major Shiite group has strong Islamist leanings and Iranian connections, or that the only Sunni group in the mix is composed of former Saddam henchmen, many with records of accommodation of or participation in atrocities committed against Kurds and Shiites. These things tend to be remembered, and to generate a certain degree of friction.