

Back when it was Canada's #3 party, Justin Trudeau's Liberals promised to change the country's first-past-the-post voting system. The NDP who usually comes in third has long promised reform of this. So many people thought that reform would happen in the event of a minority government lead by either party. But instead the Liberals won an unexpected majority of seats in parliament with only about 40 percent of the popular vote. So lots of people wonder if Trudeau will really go for it now that his party is on the winning side.

The case for a change

I think there's a pretty strong case for thinking non-cynically about this. If you look over at the United Kingdom which has a similarly messy party system you see that through the Tony Blair elections, first past the post effects tended to help Labour. In 2005, for example, they won a majority of seats on just 35 percent of the vote. But FPTP only helps you until it stops helping. Back in 2010, vote totals really seemed like they ought to have delivered a coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. But due to FPTP effects even though those two parties combined for 52 percent of the vote they didn't have a majority of seats. Forming a coalition would have required complicated reliance on several small separatist parties, and the Liberal leader decided that would be illegitimate so he formed a coalition with the Conservatives.

That ended up being disastrous for both the Lib Dems and Labour and in retrospect, New Labour should have changed the voting system when they had the chance.

Which is just to say that life is unpredictable. And FPTP effects simply mean that the unpredictable ups and downs of politics lead to bigger swings in fortune than could otherwise be the case. If you think it's a bad system on the merits, you should change it and trust that the cynical aspects even out over time.

Ramesh Ponnuru's case for pessimism

As a nice counterpoint to my story on the Democrats' struggles, I recommend that you read Ramesh Ponnuru's take on why Hillary Clinton is likely to win the election. He says, basically, that the GOP's elitist economic agenda is lame. It includes the stunning line "Republicans have little in the way of popular policy proposals to counter the appeal of liberalism."

Ponnuru's prescription is better economic policy. But in a sense, you would expect even a successful party of the right to stand for relatively unpopular un-egalitarian economic policies. The basic structure of politics is that the median voter's income is below the national average income, so redistribution is popular. The job of the anti-redistribution party is to stand up for popular positions on other issues. Ronald Reagan was against Communism and "welfare queens" and George W Bush "kept us safe" and defended traditional marriage.

Since social values change over time, old popular conservative positions are always at risk of becoming unpopular. The good news is that progressives tend to move on to new unpopular reform positions. So conservatives could give up the ghost on marriage equality, but stand up for common sense ideas about gendered bathrooms and make fun of people who use the prefix "cis." But I feel like US conservatives are a little adrift at this point on what their popular non-economic positions are. They've gotten pretty good at doing localization on this, but even though I follow US politics way more closely than the average person I'm actually kind of unclear what the national message on "values voters" even is at the moment.

Song of the day

From back when this was more transgressive, Screeching Weasel "I Wanna Be A Homosexual"