If Republican means nothing else than non-Democrat and Democrat nothing else than non-Republican, then Republican means nothing else than Republican and Democrat nothing else than Democrat.
The demonstration is straightforward. The hypotheses in the conditional part of the above sentence implies that Republican is non-non-Republican, that is, Republican is Republican. A similar demonstration can show that Democrat is Democrat.
The identity principle “A is A” prevents one from building castles on contradiction sand, but it does not tell us anything useful about A—including whether or not to vote for A.
The median voter theorem is one way to make practical sense of that. In this perspective, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are intentionally nearly identical because each is trying to capture the median voter (or the median voter group) at the middle of the political spectrum. Given certain assumptions, no one cannot get more than 50% of the vote without the median voter. But then, why do the two parties vociferously claim to be different?
I prefer the hypothesis of economist Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan:
I suppose that people who try to define both terms “Democrat” and “Republican” or “left” and “right” negatively are tribalists who don’t want simply to say “us” and “everybody else”.
A practical implication is that not too much meaning or normative value should be attached to elections where all candidates say, “We are us; vote for us and we will do what you want.” James Buchanan’s and Gordon Tullock’s constitutional political economy correctly argues, only unanimity has normative value. If unanimity is impossible even at the level or general and abstract rules, anarchy is the only ethical solution, at least in theory, as Anthony de Jasay argues.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Brady
May 4 2022 at 8:25pm
In elections with three or more candidates (e.g., many primary elections in the U.S.) the successful candidate needs to obtain only a simple plurality of the votes cast, and does not have to obtain the support of the median voter. And it should be noted that the concept of the median voter assumes that candidates are rated according to a single metric.
Pierre Lemieux
May 5 2022 at 12:45pm
Mark: You are right to point out the limitations of the median voter theorem. If by “single metric” you mean “single dimension,” however, there is a multidimensional version of the median voter theorem: see Dennis Mueller, Public Choice III, pp. 87 ff. But it introduces even more limitations of the theorem.
Craig
May 4 2022 at 9:07pm
In an abstract idealist sense, I am likely MUCH, MUCH closer to you, Professor, than say, the average Republican — at least as I perceive it, but in a pragmatic sense, I am overwhelming anti-Democrat because of the tax thing.
Pierre Lemieux
May 5 2022 at 12:50pm
Craig: Single-issue voters introduce much noise in the analysis and meaning of politics. And the wider the scope of politics, the more single-issue voters there will be.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 5 2022 at 3:46pm
My view of Democrats is a hugely diverse group vaguely interested in more equal distributional of income status and power. [Their besetting sin is ignorance of economics/disinterest in economic growth.] Republicans seem to be opposed to whatever the Democrats cause du jour is even when it’s occasionally more right than wrong.
Pierre Lemieux
May 6 2022 at 10:43am
Thomas: Your comment is interesting and points to something important that my little analysis above did not or does not account for: on some topics, despite their protests to the contrary, Democrats and Republicans are in symbiotic agreement: protectionism (excluding against immigrants), the surveillance state, presidential power and even deification, deficit financing, “the will of the people,” and such. On reflection, though, this is not surprising: all these points of agreement have the common denominator of increasing state power. So when the Republicans are in power, hopefully forever, they can finally prohibit wine; or beer in the case of the Democrats (see my post “Only One Way to Be President of All Syldavians“).
nobody.really
May 10 2022 at 4:13pm
Great. Don’t we live in anarchy now?
As I understand it, in anarchy (state of nature) I am free to do as I please–but I am at the mercy of those who are stronger than I. This gives me some incentive to try to appease those stronger powers and/or conceal my non-compliance. How does this description of anarchy differ from the world in which we currently live?
Ethical problem solved!
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
May 11 2022 at 10:30pm
I’m not an anarchist, but I note that you are redefining “anarchy”, and doing so incoherently. When one person forces another to accept his rule, that first person acts, however briefly or at length, as a ruler, as the state.
nobody.really
May 12 2022 at 2:20am
If you click on the “Anthony de Jasay” link in the original post, you’ll find a statement about “a state of nature (the standard name for original anarchy)….”
But let’s work with your premise.
What ethical steps should a person take to avoid being subject to such a “state”? These steps would, I surmise, require avoiding doing anything that would exert coercive force against another human being, however briefly or at length. At a minimum, I cannot see how to reconcile such a system with private property.
When we look at nature, do we observe creatures living in accordance the “state of nature” as hypothesized by de Jasay and other philosophers? (True, bonobo do act more peacefully than chimpanzees—but both bonobos and chimps exhibit physical aggression more than 100 times as often as humans do.)
For what reason would philosophers base their views on a mythical “state of nature”? For what reason would contemporary philosophers—those with access to information about how animals actually behave in nature—perpetuate this view?
For what reason would students of economics—a philosophy based on the observation that sentient creatures tend to compete for resources—perpetuate this view?
Perhaps de Jasay was praising pacifism. We can praise the ethical purity of pacifists like we praise the asceticism of those who refrain from sex. But if libertarianism doesn’t blind you to concepts such as “society,” you will rapidly realize that the perpetuation of ANY society relies on people who reject these premises. Ultimately, any philosophy grounded in pacifism and/or abstinence is anti-social. Here I use “anti-social” as a descriptive term–but we might draw instruction from the fact that so often people use this as a pejorative term, too.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
May 12 2022 at 8:33pm
Having a theory that the state of nature is anarchy is quite different from defining “anarchy” to be the state of nature.
A Hobbesian theory of the state of nature may well be closer to the truth than one that imagines a state of nature in which everyone conforms to natural law, and at the least a believer of the latter theory cannot explain the arisal of the state. (I am not so familiar with Jasay as to know whether he wrote of an anarchistic state-of-nature in an attempt at history, or simply as a useful thought-exercise albeit involving an implausible boundary case.) But none of that excuses confusing a world of transitory states with one in which no state what-so-ever exists.
I disavowed anarchism at the outset, so your attempt to get me to defend it is inappropriate. If you want a productive discussion, you need to begin differently and not with someone whom you have already so annoyed.
nobody.really
May 13 2022 at 11:07am
I apologize; sorry to have annoyed. And I don’t mean for you to defend anarchism as to explore its consequences.
I value autonomy, but I also observe that the strong dominate the weak. Accordingly, the weak have an incentive to organize to resist such domination (among other goals). But then, everyone has weaknesses, so everyone has incentive to organize.
And purely voluntary organization is great—except if it proves less adaptive in competition with non-voluntary organization. The fact that the world is divided into non-voluntary organizations such as states supports this latter hypothesis. We might conjecture about the effectiveness of private individual Ukrainians trying to drive back the Russian invasion compared to the effectiveness of the publicly-financed and organized Ukrainian armed forces.
And to repeat, I cannot envision a world in which people can defend property rights (especially rights in land) without at least the threat of coercion.
Maybe we could take a survey of people who embrace anarchy and see if they feel that this attitude maximizes their autonomy. We could find a sample of such people in prisons.
In sum, BECAUSE I value autonomy, I cannot grasp an ethic that seems designed to minimize the autonomy I am likely to experience. Jasay may correctly observe the shortcomings of government—but seems indifferent to the shortcomings of the alternative. As Federalist 51 notes, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Surprise—they’re not. Draw your own conclusions.
nobody.really
May 13 2022 at 12:12pm
From the dawn of history, humans have drawn their water from rivers—and dumped their sewage in the same rivers. Sewage spreads cholera and typhoid. Cholera-type diseases have been documented since the 5th century BCE; typhoid from around 430 BCE. As population densities grew, cholera and typhoid outbreaks became deadlier.
From 1848-1869, the city of Liverpool raised taxes and built sewers to empty into the river downstream of their water supply. And from 1848 to 1871, life expectancy doubled.
Who would de Jasay say lived more “ethically”: The people who supported dumping their sewage as they pleased, thereby subjecting their neighbors to cholera and typhoid–or the people who supported state-imposed practices and restrictions that doubled the lifespans of themselves and their neighbors?
Chris Oldman
May 30 2022 at 12:21pm
I don’t think the median voter theorem predicts the two parties will be identical; it says they will overlap. I imagine a political spectrum left to right, and two normal distributions of voters on either side of the median voter. The right-tail of the Left distribution overlaps with the left-tail of the Right distribution, but the two parties are still quite different.
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