RSSI’m a Member of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
October 28th, 2005 | View Comments
I hinted at my distaste for party loyalty in my reverie about the Wisconsin political climate. Registering for a political party doesn’t even make sense in Wisconsin unless you’re planning on running for office (because if you rank high enough, you’ll get campaign funding from the party), because Wisconsin has open primaries.
You can only vote in one party’s primary, but any registered voter of any party, Democratic, Republican, Independent, Green, Socialist, or Mad Hatter’s Tea, can vote in either one. All registering for a party does is make sure you get more phone calls and junk mail.
Granted, I might be a little extreme in my anti-political party stance, given that I still refuse to register for a party even though now I live in a state with closed primaries. But I often wonder how much sense it makes, really. I can understand wanting to participate in the primaries, but beyond that, I really don’t know.
Take this passage from the National Review piece I just posted to my del.icio.us links:
Recently, pollster Tony Fabrizio has been asking Republican voters whether their most important goal “is to promote individual freedom by reducing the size and scope of government and its intrusion into the lives of its citizens” or “to promote traditional values by protecting traditional marriage and the life of the unborn.” In his most recent survey, 34 percent of Republicans take the freedom position and 49 percent take the values position. “Every time I’ve stratified out the Republican Party, we’ve come up with roughly 45 to 50 percent of the party that falls into the category of being theocrats,” he says. That’s right, half of Republicans are Republicans not because they want to reduce the size of government but because of gay marriage and abortion. (And Fabrizio reports that the 49 percent is far more homogenous in its views than the 34 percent.)
If you buy his statistics, you have to come to the realization that the Republican party is comprised of two groups of people whose views on some rather key issues are diametrically opposed. One group wants the government to butt out and let the people make their own value judgments; the other wants the government to butt in and enforce obedience to some national standard of traditional values.
And yet the two groups feel a kinship, because both groups have arbitrarily chosen to identify with the arbitrary label “Republican”.
If I had more than a vague idea of what the Democratic party platform is these days, other than “Hate Bush No Matter What”, I’m sure I could find an equally perplexing situation.
But what this means for Republican party loyalists is that roughly half of the money you give to the party will be spent in support of causes that you actively oppose. And if you insist on voting only for Republicans, roughly half the time you will be voting for someone who will try to enact policies you hate and outright rejecting a candidate who may actually be ideologically closer to you.
Furthermore, you are hamstringing your own ability to enforce good government behavior because in a two-party system, removing a corrupt or ineffective politician from office typically requires electing the challenger from the opposing party.
Party loyalty makes the most sense if you are near the top of the party hierarchy, and thus are in a position to directly influence the party’s choices and ensure that you directly benefit from the party’s successes. But for the rest of us, it’s a crapshoot.
At least I have an appreciation for how easy it is to manipulate people into being loyal to a group - ANY group, even an arbitrarily-defined and randomly-assigned group. Tweak a few things and you can make people be endlessly loyal to a group, even against their own self-interests. In fact, I’m giving that lecture to my social psychology students in a little over two weeks.
Because if I didn’t know that, I would just think that they’re mad.
Yvonne posted this on October 28th, 2005 @ 3:46am in News/Politics, Wisconsin | Permalink to "I’m a Member of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party"
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