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Imagine how annoying they are if you'd prefer Biden to win.
One underrated thing about living in Australia with compulsory, ranked choice voting, is that our political discourse is blessedly free of this kind of self-indulgent signalling. We obviously have our own domestic foibles (per Walter Cronkite: too many journalists, not enough news) but more generally: structuralist comparative analyses of political discourses strikes me as something both rich and relatively understudied -- especially in wider conversations about polarisation, epistemic closure, radicalisation, new-media landscapes and so on. There's been some research on how the US primary system exerts a centrifugal force on candidates (e.g. adams/merrill), how polarisation necessarily sustains marginal turnout (e.g.), and so on but I haven't seen a holistic structuralist take on all the factors together in those conversations.
There's clearly some lensing/closure effects that makes these kind of sentiments in the US particularly annoying when mediated through social media and the Algorithm, but the actual underlying cause seems much more rooted in the inability of the political system to a) co-opt and recuperate extremists (or more broadly, those whose views aren't represented by mainstream parties) and b) handle and mitigate swathes of society whose potential votes are rendered statistically meaningless (both in reducing this alienation in absolute terms, and alleviating how it feels on the ground).
Australia has a few structural advantages in this regard that makes the political discourse significantly less annoying than America. RCV lets minor parties absorb fringe or special-interest positions, while necessarily funnelling their preferences inward to more major parties (effectively defuses the 'no one represents me' line and complaints about picking the lesser of two evils). Compulsory voting makes political expenditures targeted not at maintaining turnout in single-issue, activism-bound constituencies (abortion, guns, most obviously in the US) which allows these factions to be more effectively clientalised by major parties: ideological activism groups must be catered to in the US to avoid demoralising them as turnout engines. In Australia where they can't deliver turnout, these special-interest activism groups can be much more easily captured -- someone particularly interested in abortion might get upset when the libnats loosen access, but they're hardly going to preference labor over it.
But is Australia better? To my eyes, it is more authoritarian. Sometimes enshrining the blob has the effect that change is quite difficult.
Better in what sense? The political discourse is absolutely better, and I would say our political institutions are much more stable and effective at the general business of government: running elections, writing and enforcing laws, handling the myriad edge cases and emergent problems that crop up constantly in complex systems.
Australians are more culturally authoritarian than Americans in one sense, but there is less perceived distance between citizenry and government. Where in the US the government is seen as oppositional to the citizenry in many respects (independent of party affiliation, e.g. with cops) and must be constrained via various 'checks and balances', an armed citizenry and so on, authoritarian stances taken by Australian government are parsed domestically as Australian society exerting its will over itself. This difference in perspective is why you had many people in the US (including some on this forum) convinced that the Australian government would never end Covid restrictions or freely give up Covid-era powers, and that our politicians who implemented lockdowns would pay a steep political price for it.
I really can't comprehend to this day why potentially the most covid-hysterical state gave up the powers. I think your politicians are stupid.
Yeah, I think failure to model differences in culture and the political incentives at play led to a lot of bad external predictions. In reality the lockdowns were stop-start in response to new infections being detected. It wasn't surprising domestically to see covid powers dialled back because it had essentially already happened a few times by that point (and the publicly accepted rationale was buying time for vaccines)
I don't think it's culture, I think it's timidness. The whole developed world could turn into 1984 literally tomorrow with zero problems, if only the upper class wished so. I should be playing coy at this point, saying how this is not something to be mentioned openly, but who the fuck among them reads this forgotten corner of the internet, 2rafa is the closest here.
I disagree entirely, I think American politicians are far more timid than Australian ones. Our political culture is utterly ruthless.
Yes, but part of that is the tools they have available. Trumps cabinet had the option of being obsequious or resigning, and without any real mechanism for removing him that didn't involve cosigning with the dems, they spent their energies on ever more creative legal theories on his criminal immunity as if he's Louis XVI. Australian politics proves if you give a politician a knife, they'll happily stick it someone's back, and while they can obviously get a bit stab-happy it's a genuine boon to have the privileges of leadership be conditional on the continual, sustained confidence of the led.
American journos are certainly more timid and status/access-conscious than Australians, which is why Jonathan Swan's interview stood out so much, and I'd definitely put that down to cultural over structural factors, so I'm sure there's a bit of both at play.
Reminds me of a presser I went to with Madeleine Albright and Julia Gillard in Sydney ages back. Questions addressed to Madeleine Albright, per her aide, should be prefaced only with 'Madam Secretary'. Questions directed to the prime minister, of course, were addressed to 'Julia'. It's hardly as simple as one country being more deferent to authority than the other.
For those that haven't seen it, here is a recent sitting Australian PM getting booted off a citizen's front lawn.
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yeah, Australia also lacks the paranoid style, but that's always been idiosyncratically american in the anglosphere, going back to Hofstadter's 1964 essay and probably beyond
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Australia is certainly more authoritarian (for good or ill), but I think that's primarily due to cultural difference rather than institutional design. If anything I would say the type of highly-engaged Australian who would still be a reliable voter if voting were optional is more authoritarian again than the random person who doesn't care about politics.
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As far as I can tell, most of the multiparty parliamentary democracies end up being functionally one-party states; there's one party (with many names) whose various factions rise and fall, and a big chunk which is simply kept out of power entirely. The UK seems to be something of an exception.
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Yes, I am profoundly grateful for the way that living in Australia makes so many of these arguments moot.
Turnout is irrelevant. All elections have 90+% turnout. It is impossible to win by turning out the base.
All votes must be full-preferential. It is therefore impossible to harm your own side by voting third party. All votes will ultimately flow to either the first-ranked or the second-ranked party.
The Australian system isn't perfect and it's possible to contrive weird edge cases where you get unintuitive results, but in the main it is just so much better than, well, almost any other country in the world (and especially messes like the US or the UK) that I have to feel grateful for it.
I still marvel occasionally at the fact that a solid third or more of the political discourse around the 2019 election revolved around minutiae regarding the refundability of tax credits attached to retiree superannuation accounts. Just weeks on weeks of it, probably lost Shorten the election. Australia may not be a particularly intellectual country imo, but the proverbial 'pub test' here presumes a baseline level of Tocquevillian political literacy/sophistication far beyond what most countries could hope for. I don't think that's necessarily because we're particularly special as a people (perhaps a little bit), but we have some very well-constructed institutions that curb some of our worse impulses.
I'm kind of excited that we're going to get a serious debate over nuclear power this election.
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Political discourse is annoying in America because the stakes are perceived as so high and it's like a spectator sport, but that never really ends. Politics is also very personal in America. The 'us vs. them' mentality makes politics in the US more divisive or polarizing than elsewhere in the world, although it's not like this isn't seen elsewhere too...but it's amplified by social media and a 24-7 news cycle.
Yes, though if you model political discourse across parties, politicians, media and voters as the emergent aggregation of various goal-oriented strategic activities to win elections and sway policy, then that discourse is constrained by political structures. These political structures mediate how different kinds of moves in the discursive space actually achieve political ends and which are more useful than others. My larger point above is that the US has political structures which incentivises various rhetorical moves which result in a political discourse that is particularly annoying.
e.g. the sentiment that this election is of truly existential, catastrophic import makes strategic sense when a party's marginal voter is someone who already agrees/aligns with the party but needs to hit a certain activation threshold to actually cast a vote. Propagating this sentiment does not make sense if a party's marginal voter is going to vote regardless but whose alignment between parties can be competed for. The structural factor of compulsory voting impacts what political messaging is more viable (and this calculus applies not only to politicians and the media, but activists on twitter as well).
Leaving aside for now whether either approach is more generative of good policy outcomes and a functioning government, the latter is certainly less annoying.
The Electoral College for example as such a structure...if as few as 100k voters can decide the outcome of the election ,it means a lot of campaigning to reach them. under a mandatory popular voting system, there would be no need for campaigning or politics for that matter , as democratic win would be foregone conclusion .
100,000 voters cannot decide the outcome of US presidential elections. Given certain assumptions about which states are and are not in play, sure, but those assumptions are predicated on the votes of tens of millions of other voters; these 100,000 voters cannot elect Zombie Hitler over the objections of the rest of the country.
100,000 voters voting the other way would flip most Australian elections to the other major party, too (although admittedly we have a much-smaller voter base), at least if you got to pick exactly which ones to flip lots of marginal seats to 50%+1 the other way.
It should be noted that we just flat-out do not have any direct equivalent to the US President with a nationwide election for one position - the Australian Prime Minister is not directly elected but rather elected by the House of Representatives, and can have lost the two-party-preferred vote if the voters for that party are better distributed among seats (this happened in 1998; the two-party-preferred vote narrowly favoured Labour over the Liberal/National Coalition but the latter won more seats and thus government). And our Senate favours less-populous states over more-populous ones in precisely the same way as yours does - Tasmania gets 12 Senators just like New South Wales, despite NSW having over 14x Tasmania's population (though the territories, which are even less populated, do at least get fewer, and Tasmania's an outlier among the state populations).
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It may be preferable to have the democratic legitimation of the government to be a foregone conclusion, but as political actors have interests that extend beyond simple legitimacy I think we'd still be stuck with political campaigners for the time being.
While there are various obvious ways you can reduce the number of people who are statistically disenfranchised, for want of a better term, I think less examined is the way this can be compensated for to reduce alienation. It's not like parliamentary systems don't have safe seats.
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