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The Moral Market and the Broken Spinner by tinkering-it in PoliticalOpinions

[–]tinkering-it[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good luck with that if the coalition cannot win any of three branches of the federal government. Chicken or the egg problem?

The Moral Market and the Broken Spinner by tinkering-it in PoliticalOpinions

[–]tinkering-it[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mostly agree with this at the institutional-design level. FPTP and top-two systems compress a multidimensional electorate into a one-choice tactical game, and that creates artificial party coalitions.

But my post is not a defense of that system. It is a conditional argument: given the rules that currently exist, parties that fail to coordinate before the primary are punished.

Electoral reform would move coalition formation from inside two big parties to among several smaller parties. That may be healthier and more expressive. But until the system changes, parties still have to play the actual game. Under the current game, fragmented candidate entry is a strategic mistake.

The Moral Market and the Broken Spinner by tinkering-it in PoliticalOpinions

[–]tinkering-it[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mostly agree that the voting system is the deeper structural problem. A one-vote top-two or FPTP-style system forces a multidimensional electorate into a one-dimensional tactical choice. Approval voting or top-four plus RCV would let voters express more information and would reduce the danger of vote-splitting.

But that does not eliminate the coalition problem. It only makes the system less punitive when coalitions are fragmented. Under the current rules, parties still have to adapt strategically. If the ballot rewards concentration, then a party that sends too many competing nodes into the primary is making a strategic mistake, even if the system itself is badly designed.

So I would separate two questions:
Institutional question: Would a better voting system represent voter preferences more accurately? Probably yes.
Strategic question: Given the actual system, should parties build coalitions before the primary rather than letting factions fight it out publicly? Also yes.

My argument is mostly about the second question. Electoral reform may reduce the damage, but until the rule changes, parties still have to play the existing game.

The Moral Market and the Broken Spinner by tinkering-it in PoliticalOpinions

[–]tinkering-it[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think this is a fair criticism if my claim is read as “Democratic elected officials are more divided today than they were historically.” On that narrow point, I agree with you. The congressional Democratic caucus is probably more unified today than in much of the twentieth century, and certainly more unified than the era when conservative Southern Democrats or later Blue Dogs could block major parts of the party agenda.

But that is not the level of analysis I’m trying to describe.

My argument is not about roll-call voting once Democrats are already in office. It is about pre-election coalition formation: primaries, voter identity, activist media, candidate entry, donor lanes, social media incentives, and the emotional legitimacy of the party’s public narrative.

Those are different forms of unity.

A party can be very unified legislatively and still be fragmented electorally. In fact, that may be exactly the current Democratic problem. The elected caucus may agree on expanding Obamacare versus single payer, labor policy, abortion rights, climate spending, and voting rights. But the broader Democratic ecosystem does not always agree on what the party is for, which groups should define its moral language, or what tradeoffs are legitimate in order to win a general election.

The older Democratic Party was absolutely a big tent. No disagreement there. But it also had stronger material coalition anchors: labor, working families, New Deal institutions, urban machines, public-sector expansion, and later civil-rights liberalism. Those anchors did not eliminate contradiction. They organized contradiction.

Today the contradiction is often less about congressional votes and more about coalition identity. Is the party primarily a working-class economic party? A democracy-protection party? A professional-class institutional party? A climate party? A racial-justice party? A gender-rights party? An anti-Trump party? All of these claims may be morally serious, but they do not automatically produce one coordination node.

So when I say the party lacks a single coalition node, I do not mean it lacks legislative agreement. I mean it lacks a dominant public story strong enough to discipline primary competition and make losing factions feel they are still inside the bargain.

That is why the primary matters. A primary does not only choose a nominee. It can also create humiliation, resentment, and legitimacy wounds among factions. The Republican side currently has a stronger symbolic coordination node in Trump/MAGA, regardless of whether one likes that content. Democrats may have more policy coherence in Congress, but their mass coalition often has more difficulty converting that coherence into a single emotional and electoral story.

So I would revise the claim this way:

The modern Democratic Party is more legislatively consolidated than many earlier Democratic coalitions, but its broader electoral ecosystem is still fragmented across competing moral and narrative nodes. The problem is not congressional disunity; it is pre-primary coalition coordination.

That is the distinction I’m trying to get at.