The rise of the Lib-Dems is purely a function of the degeneration of both Labour and the Tories. Imagine a parallel universe in which voters were so fed up with the GOP and the Democrats in 2000 that Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader were on the verge of winning the popular vote….
And why would that not be good? It seems to me that Klegg isn’t a nutcase, and has good ideas. Why SHOULDN’T the Lib Dems win one? Who says that it always has to be Labour v. Conservative? Or Republican v. GOP? This assessment is flawed.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to delve that deeply into British politics. Sticking to my comparison, if you truly think Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader getting 35% of the vote instead of 3.5% of the vote isn’t scary, you and I have plainly different views of what constitutes a healthy body politic. Beyond that, my central point remains unchallenged: the Lib-Dems haven’t changed much of anything, and Nick Clegg is a standard Lib-Dem by most measures, but he is in the position he is in because Brown and Cameron both leave so much to be desired that the electorate has no choice but to consider looking elsewhere. Sadly, that leaves the Lib-Dems and the BNP. Thatcherites and libertarians practically are nowhere to be found.
I actually don’t think Nader getting 35% of the vote is scary. I wouldn’t like it (just like the Lib Dems have my skepticism). Buchanan might scare me . . . but we’re not talking about the BNP (or anything like the BNP), now are we?
Do you really think there’s nothing better out there then the Tories or Labour? Or the GOP and the Dems? Why on earth should we stick with these broken parties? I think an electorate looking the scrap the current system for a new one is a GOOD thing. I only wish we could have something similar in the USA.
Also, Trojan, let me remind you of history. The Labour party has only been around for 100 years. Technically, THEY were the scary party (as you put it) at that time, and the Liberals (which through a convoluted path became the Lib Dems) were the normal left of centre party (have to use the British spelling here. Its the law.)
There is no reason for this not to change again. Likewise, the party system in the USA hasn’t always been GOP vs. Democrats. Maybe the death of one of the current parties to be replaced by a better one would be a GOOD thing. Goodness knows, we needed a replacement for the completely dead Whigs, and the Republicans did that job admirably for a while.
David K.
I’m always amused how the GOP and Dems of today are basically flip-floped from where they were 100+ years ago.
Alasdair
GentleBeings of Breeding and Distinction (and David K) – there is a reason that an large annoying biting insect is called a cleg in Great Britain …
While Clegg, strictly speaking, as far as we know, that is, has not yet been diagnosed as a nut-case, it’s not for want of him trying … and, of course, in comparison to the Honourable Charles Kennedy, he is sanity personified …
The Liberal Party merged with some of the loonier Labour folk when they seceded from the Labour Party (who temporarily called themselves the Social Democrats) – and are currently known as the Lib-Dems …
While, in UK politics, due to its nature, there is *always* a possibility that the Lib-Dems will suddenly surge into being the largest party in Parliament, the per capita consumption of strong hallucinogenics just isn’t high enough for that to become even vaguely probable …
The Lib-Dems are the party in the UK most likely to thoroughly debate about and then actually vote to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide, for example …
While many in the US fully believe that the GOP is a conservative party which marches in lockstep, the reality is that trying to run the GOP has to be like herding hyper-ADHD kittens … and *that* pales by comparison with how the UK Conservative Party are … because of those chaos factors, the loony side of the Tories basically never manages to get anything particularly extreme done – whereas they *do* manage to get some fairly extreme stuff, debated, aired, discussed, and then set aside, so that the real and useful stuff can be done … Buchanan or Nader or even the Official Democratic Party nominee Lyndon LaRouche getting 35% isn’t scary as long as someone else reasonable gets over 50% …
What is needed in the UK now, is what is needed in the US now …
A governing set-up whereby priority is given to restoring the economy first, second and third – and only then working on the rest of the stuff … when the economy is healthy, the country can afford to spend a bunch on healthcare, on high-speed rail, on the Pelosi School of Expressive Visual Movement, on renewable rainbow power, and the like … the government could even afford to subsidise Air America so that it could stay on the air (in spite of ‘the market’ passing its judgment on the quality and value of Air America) …
To do that, the country needs a robust domestic energy supply, currently probably based on nuclear since that is currently the only proven feasible industrial-grade reliable power source … the country needs to develop domestic resources, domestic raw materials as well as importing raw materials, to produce sellable goods valued by folk around the planet … (on the humanitarian side, we should get back to producing excess grain/foodstuffs to ship to hungry countries rather than converting edibles into alcohol for vehicles to burn) … and then the government, once it has allowed and encouraged those first two (or three) areas to again make progress, it needs to get the @@#&^%# out of the way and allow human ingenuity to restore the prosperity of the country …
While it’s doing that, yes, the government can actually encourage the regulators to regulate the frauds like Goldman Sachs, and, yes, if necessary, allow them to fail …
In the US, currently, the only party which *might* do the above is the GOP, and there’s no guarantee even with them … Obama/Pelosi/Reid – it ain’t gonna happen any more than with Nader …
In the UK, its the Tories under Cameron where it *might* happen, again, with no guarantee … under Labour (NuLabour) there’s no chance … and under the Lib-Dems, last time I looked, their energy plans were along the lines of a plan to harness unicorns in giant hamster-wheels lined with verdant pastures (and their defence plans were something like to beat their swords into wind-chimes) … (yes, it *IS* amazing how many plants in boggy areas like a lot of the UK are actively hallucinogenic, from woad to bog myrtle) …
B. Minich, there are two general approaches to a two-party system: One that likes to see one party engulfed in flames and replaced by some new flavor of the day; and another, more mature approach that prefers to see the two parties evolve and adjust to accommodate policies that appropriately address the hot issues of the day and strive to appeal to 50%+1. The Lib-Dems will never appeal to 50%+1 and their political ascension represents a fracturing of the body politic into something far less governable. That is simply not a healthy outcome.
Sandy Underpants
A 2 party system is just a 1 party system with 2 branches. What we have in the US is a load of horse crap. You vote this party in and they trash the country, you vote this party out and replace them with the other party and they trash the country, so you vote in the party that trashed the country before this party? That’s madness. It’s long past due blowing up the system we have, but it seems closer to becoming a realistic goal today then ever before.
Sandy, you get the government you deserve. In general, Americans repeatedly say in their votes and in polls that they want more services, but they want to pay less taxes, so voila! you get exploding budgets on borrowed nickels. The Republicans prefer to solve the problem by cutting back government, while the Democrats want to fill the gap by increasing taxes (again, broadly generalizing here). When one solution becomes more painful then the other, the people switch parties.
Occasionally you see politicians solve the problem by trying to somehow square the circle. Clinton initially followed the normal Democratic formula and got his ass handed to him in 1994, so he got creative and claimed to be a Democrat interested in actually constraining the size of government. He relented and signed onto welfare reform, agreed to some tax cuts, and rode the stock market bubble to close the deficits and thus was wildly popular. But ultimately it wasn’t sustainable — the bubble plus, depressed energy prices, reasonably low interest rates, and the Cold War peace dividend created a useful fiction that fundamental, structural government reform was happening when it really wasn’t.
Bush tried to follow a similar approach but from the right — we’ll cut taxes but we’ll be compassionate and you’ll get to keep your services because the resulting economic growth will make up the revenue difference. This may or may not have worked in theory (a stock market bubble popping, 9/11, and two wars made it practically impossible for that to ever happen in reality), but it too was popular. And ultimately, unsustainable, especially with a GOP that just couldn’t say no to pork and spending. So the voters elected the Dems — first as a check on Bush’s spending, though that didn’t solve the problem.
Today, along comes Obama, promising “hope” and “change”, and the people bought into that — then became outraged at the predictable result of handing Democrats total control of the nation’s purse. What we are seeing now is a backlash against the explosion of the size of government and Obama’s deficit-spending, so the result will be the GOP will pick up enough seats in the House and Senate this November to check Obama spending.
The moral of the story is, the problem isn’t the two-party system, the problem is the electorate.
Jazz
I agree with this: the problem isn’t the two-party system, the problem is the electorate, and yet I also agree with B. Minich that the US would benefit from a new two-party system around which political debate occurs. The Republican/Democrat battle lines are almost a century old, they are hideously familiar, and probably no longer even all that applicable. Familiar concepts are pleasant – think about the pleasingly low effort of driving a stretch of highway you’ve been on a million times before – and lord knows the traditional Democrat v. Republican fault lines have been hashed out for generations in the US. So familiar are they that the electorate arguably doesn’t put much thought into them anymore.
As an example of this, consider Sarah Palin’s leadership of the Tea Party movement. Tea Partiers are mostly conservative, or at least, they are mostly focused on anti-government-spending memes that have been hashed over repeatedly for years – thus those memes are easy on the ears, as Palin is easy on the eyes. Quite a package when she hits those traditional anti-government-excess notes.
Does it bother any tea partiers that when Palin was mayor of Wasilla she drove the city into unprecedented debt to build a fun, but unnecessary, sports arena? Or the ginormous windfall profit tax on big oil as governor? Seriously, Palin as spiritual leader of the tea partiers makes about as much sense as Tiger Woods as spiritual leader of the Promise Keepers. To be sure, Tiger Woods could be a leader of the Promise Keepers, but he’d have some ‘splaining to do. Sarah Palin, not so much. This is not because people are dumb, rather, because the memes Palin channels are so familiar that explanation isn’t really necessary.
So give the electorate something new. Something they’d have to think about. They aren’t dumb, they’ll get to the right place. The problem is that the concepts that drive political discourse are so warmed over that it is hard to resist the pleasant feelings associated with processing them shallowly.
The rise of the Lib-Dems is purely a function of the degeneration of both Labour and the Tories. Imagine a parallel universe in which voters were so fed up with the GOP and the Democrats in 2000 that Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader were on the verge of winning the popular vote….
Not good.
And why would that not be good? It seems to me that Klegg isn’t a nutcase, and has good ideas. Why SHOULDN’T the Lib Dems win one? Who says that it always has to be Labour v. Conservative? Or Republican v. GOP? This assessment is flawed.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to delve that deeply into British politics. Sticking to my comparison, if you truly think Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader getting 35% of the vote instead of 3.5% of the vote isn’t scary, you and I have plainly different views of what constitutes a healthy body politic. Beyond that, my central point remains unchallenged: the Lib-Dems haven’t changed much of anything, and Nick Clegg is a standard Lib-Dem by most measures, but he is in the position he is in because Brown and Cameron both leave so much to be desired that the electorate has no choice but to consider looking elsewhere. Sadly, that leaves the Lib-Dems and the BNP. Thatcherites and libertarians practically are nowhere to be found.
I actually don’t think Nader getting 35% of the vote is scary. I wouldn’t like it (just like the Lib Dems have my skepticism). Buchanan might scare me . . . but we’re not talking about the BNP (or anything like the BNP), now are we?
Do you really think there’s nothing better out there then the Tories or Labour? Or the GOP and the Dems? Why on earth should we stick with these broken parties? I think an electorate looking the scrap the current system for a new one is a GOOD thing. I only wish we could have something similar in the USA.
Also, Trojan, let me remind you of history. The Labour party has only been around for 100 years. Technically, THEY were the scary party (as you put it) at that time, and the Liberals (which through a convoluted path became the Lib Dems) were the normal left of centre party (have to use the British spelling here. Its the law.)
There is no reason for this not to change again. Likewise, the party system in the USA hasn’t always been GOP vs. Democrats. Maybe the death of one of the current parties to be replaced by a better one would be a GOOD thing. Goodness knows, we needed a replacement for the completely dead Whigs, and the Republicans did that job admirably for a while.
I’m always amused how the GOP and Dems of today are basically flip-floped from where they were 100+ years ago.
GentleBeings of Breeding and Distinction (and David K) – there is a reason that an large annoying biting insect is called a cleg in Great Britain …
While Clegg, strictly speaking, as far as we know, that is, has not yet been diagnosed as a nut-case, it’s not for want of him trying … and, of course, in comparison to the Honourable Charles Kennedy, he is sanity personified …
The Liberal Party merged with some of the loonier Labour folk when they seceded from the Labour Party (who temporarily called themselves the Social Democrats) – and are currently known as the Lib-Dems …
While, in UK politics, due to its nature, there is *always* a possibility that the Lib-Dems will suddenly surge into being the largest party in Parliament, the per capita consumption of strong hallucinogenics just isn’t high enough for that to become even vaguely probable …
The Lib-Dems are the party in the UK most likely to thoroughly debate about and then actually vote to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide, for example …
While many in the US fully believe that the GOP is a conservative party which marches in lockstep, the reality is that trying to run the GOP has to be like herding hyper-ADHD kittens … and *that* pales by comparison with how the UK Conservative Party are … because of those chaos factors, the loony side of the Tories basically never manages to get anything particularly extreme done – whereas they *do* manage to get some fairly extreme stuff, debated, aired, discussed, and then set aside, so that the real and useful stuff can be done … Buchanan or Nader or even the Official Democratic Party nominee Lyndon LaRouche getting 35% isn’t scary as long as someone else reasonable gets over 50% …
What is needed in the UK now, is what is needed in the US now …
A governing set-up whereby priority is given to restoring the economy first, second and third – and only then working on the rest of the stuff … when the economy is healthy, the country can afford to spend a bunch on healthcare, on high-speed rail, on the Pelosi School of Expressive Visual Movement, on renewable rainbow power, and the like … the government could even afford to subsidise Air America so that it could stay on the air (in spite of ‘the market’ passing its judgment on the quality and value of Air America) …
To do that, the country needs a robust domestic energy supply, currently probably based on nuclear since that is currently the only proven feasible industrial-grade reliable power source … the country needs to develop domestic resources, domestic raw materials as well as importing raw materials, to produce sellable goods valued by folk around the planet … (on the humanitarian side, we should get back to producing excess grain/foodstuffs to ship to hungry countries rather than converting edibles into alcohol for vehicles to burn) … and then the government, once it has allowed and encouraged those first two (or three) areas to again make progress, it needs to get the @@#&^%# out of the way and allow human ingenuity to restore the prosperity of the country …
While it’s doing that, yes, the government can actually encourage the regulators to regulate the frauds like Goldman Sachs, and, yes, if necessary, allow them to fail …
In the US, currently, the only party which *might* do the above is the GOP, and there’s no guarantee even with them … Obama/Pelosi/Reid – it ain’t gonna happen any more than with Nader …
In the UK, its the Tories under Cameron where it *might* happen, again, with no guarantee … under Labour (NuLabour) there’s no chance … and under the Lib-Dems, last time I looked, their energy plans were along the lines of a plan to harness unicorns in giant hamster-wheels lined with verdant pastures (and their defence plans were something like to beat their swords into wind-chimes) … (yes, it *IS* amazing how many plants in boggy areas like a lot of the UK are actively hallucinogenic, from woad to bog myrtle) …
B. Minich, there are two general approaches to a two-party system: One that likes to see one party engulfed in flames and replaced by some new flavor of the day; and another, more mature approach that prefers to see the two parties evolve and adjust to accommodate policies that appropriately address the hot issues of the day and strive to appeal to 50%+1. The Lib-Dems will never appeal to 50%+1 and their political ascension represents a fracturing of the body politic into something far less governable. That is simply not a healthy outcome.
A 2 party system is just a 1 party system with 2 branches. What we have in the US is a load of horse crap. You vote this party in and they trash the country, you vote this party out and replace them with the other party and they trash the country, so you vote in the party that trashed the country before this party? That’s madness. It’s long past due blowing up the system we have, but it seems closer to becoming a realistic goal today then ever before.
Sandy, you get the government you deserve. In general, Americans repeatedly say in their votes and in polls that they want more services, but they want to pay less taxes, so voila! you get exploding budgets on borrowed nickels. The Republicans prefer to solve the problem by cutting back government, while the Democrats want to fill the gap by increasing taxes (again, broadly generalizing here). When one solution becomes more painful then the other, the people switch parties.
Occasionally you see politicians solve the problem by trying to somehow square the circle. Clinton initially followed the normal Democratic formula and got his ass handed to him in 1994, so he got creative and claimed to be a Democrat interested in actually constraining the size of government. He relented and signed onto welfare reform, agreed to some tax cuts, and rode the stock market bubble to close the deficits and thus was wildly popular. But ultimately it wasn’t sustainable — the bubble plus, depressed energy prices, reasonably low interest rates, and the Cold War peace dividend created a useful fiction that fundamental, structural government reform was happening when it really wasn’t.
Bush tried to follow a similar approach but from the right — we’ll cut taxes but we’ll be compassionate and you’ll get to keep your services because the resulting economic growth will make up the revenue difference. This may or may not have worked in theory (a stock market bubble popping, 9/11, and two wars made it practically impossible for that to ever happen in reality), but it too was popular. And ultimately, unsustainable, especially with a GOP that just couldn’t say no to pork and spending. So the voters elected the Dems — first as a check on Bush’s spending, though that didn’t solve the problem.
Today, along comes Obama, promising “hope” and “change”, and the people bought into that — then became outraged at the predictable result of handing Democrats total control of the nation’s purse. What we are seeing now is a backlash against the explosion of the size of government and Obama’s deficit-spending, so the result will be the GOP will pick up enough seats in the House and Senate this November to check Obama spending.
The moral of the story is, the problem isn’t the two-party system, the problem is the electorate.
I agree with this: the problem isn’t the two-party system, the problem is the electorate, and yet I also agree with B. Minich that the US would benefit from a new two-party system around which political debate occurs. The Republican/Democrat battle lines are almost a century old, they are hideously familiar, and probably no longer even all that applicable. Familiar concepts are pleasant – think about the pleasingly low effort of driving a stretch of highway you’ve been on a million times before – and lord knows the traditional Democrat v. Republican fault lines have been hashed out for generations in the US. So familiar are they that the electorate arguably doesn’t put much thought into them anymore.
As an example of this, consider Sarah Palin’s leadership of the Tea Party movement. Tea Partiers are mostly conservative, or at least, they are mostly focused on anti-government-spending memes that have been hashed over repeatedly for years – thus those memes are easy on the ears, as Palin is easy on the eyes. Quite a package when she hits those traditional anti-government-excess notes.
Does it bother any tea partiers that when Palin was mayor of Wasilla she drove the city into unprecedented debt to build a fun, but unnecessary, sports arena? Or the ginormous windfall profit tax on big oil as governor? Seriously, Palin as spiritual leader of the tea partiers makes about as much sense as Tiger Woods as spiritual leader of the Promise Keepers. To be sure, Tiger Woods could be a leader of the Promise Keepers, but he’d have some ‘splaining to do. Sarah Palin, not so much. This is not because people are dumb, rather, because the memes Palin channels are so familiar that explanation isn’t really necessary.
So give the electorate something new. Something they’d have to think about. They aren’t dumb, they’ll get to the right place. The problem is that the concepts that drive political discourse are so warmed over that it is hard to resist the pleasant feelings associated with processing them shallowly.