Jeeze, I find myself wanting to write about politics again. I swore I wasn't going to do that, and I've been trying to resist the urge, but there's an observation that just wants to come out.

A lot of people hate the American "winner take all" system. They hate the two party system. These are the people who think we should use things like "instant runoff voting", because it gives people holding fringe opinions more of an opportunity to make a difference.

Most of those people are lefties, and they are influential in the Democratic party. The Republicans are less enamored of that kind of thing.

Hence the irony: the Republican primary process has mostly consisted of state level winner-take-all contests, and as a result, the Republicans now have a clear winner. The Republican convention, once it happens, will be just as meaningless as party conventions have been every four years since about 1972.

The Democrats have mostly been using proportional delegate allocations. This is, supposedly, more fair, or so they believe.

The Democrats also have "super delegates". The Republicans don't.

And that's why this nominating process has been so much fun: The nominally-fascist-awful-elitist Republicans (if you listen to radical Democrats) have unambiguously selected a candidate via the primary process. But the most likely result of the Democratic primary/caucus process is that no candidate will have a majority going into the convention.

And therefore, the Democratic candidate will be chosen by the superdelegates, who are beholden to no voter. Can you say "smoke-filled room"? Well, not the "smoke" part, anymore, but the principle is the same. And no matter what they do, they're going to seriously alienate a large part of the party base.

UPDATE: Myself, I happen to think that "winner take all" is a good thing, because it represents a high noise-rejection threshold. That means the system can tolerate a great deal of noise without breaking down.

I explained it in greater depth, via round-about means, in this post five years ago. The bottom line: winner-take-all systems can tolerate a much broader range of political speech. Proportional representation systems tend to be much more nervous and tend to implement content-based restrictions on political speech.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 03:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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