There are at least two separate questions here: 1) why does the US have only two major parties; and 2) given such, why do people often pick one and stick with it for all issues?

The first has been studied to death. It has to do with more with how the US government is set up and less with the psychology of its people. There are other countries with different setups that are not two-party dominant. One viable way out of such dominance is some form of party-list proportional representation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_represe...) .

The second is all about psychology, it most certainly has several components at play. I posit the most prevalent are attitudes of commitment given the initial choice of party and some form of path of least resistance.

The former is common in psychology. It is a natural instinct to think your group is better as soon as you join it, for whatever reason, even an arbitrary one. This even happens in psychology experiments when groups are assigned randomly.

The latter reason is simply most people don't research any issues nor do they want to. They go with perhaps the simplest method to decide, which is listen to what the group told me before. There is some real trade-off here. To be fully informed is perhaps impossible. You need some sort of proxy for most policy issues. Blindly following one of two major parties (on the other extreme) is probably not the answer either of course.

I would like to introduce to this thread a book that recently came out called Myth of the Rational Voter. Byran Caplan argues that voters on the whole make irrational decisions and even lists 4 specific "biases" that voters suffer from.

Here's a podcast that explains the book: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/06/caplan_on_the_m.htm...

Your observation would work better on your personal blog than as a story on "Hacker News".

And here's why:

- It's simply conjecture, as far as I can tell. It even goes so far as to say "invariably", which is a pretty strong word for something with no data to back it up.

- It's not particularly well thought out, if I may say so respectfully. The reason the US has two parties is partly because of how the electoral system works - first past the post causes people to glom together in the center, as per the hotelling effect. This has advantages (lessens extremism in some ways) and disadvantages (less representative than a broader range of parties).

- I would expect a serious article on this topic to delve into other voting systems and their effects on parties, and representation of the spectrum of views held by the electorate.

So, this is what we get from someone who is without doubt a smart guy, who has been a member of our community for some time, and if his "karma" is anything to go by, is generally respected in his views on startups due to interesting and insightful comments.

Just imagine what happens when you start fiddling with those variables - more people who haven't taken part of the community, for instance, and the possibility for low-quality content becomes very high.

Whether or not this is the appropriate forum for this particular post, it's high time that hackers became politically aware. Existing power structures are set on criminalizing possession and usage of information in order to enforce artificial scarcity to maintain profits: Germany just passed a law declaring "hacker tools" illegal; the RIAA is now arguing that "making files available", even without copying, is infringement; there are provisions of the DMCA that make decrypting information you have legal access to illegal (DeCSS); Comcast is stopping BitTorrent transfers; patents threaten everyone; even your home Internet connection is severely throttled upstream to make you more of a consumer. The list could go on and on (Skype and new Federal eavesdropping-on-citizens-without-warrants "laws"; possible capital gains/income tax on virtual goods you've never sold; suing entire college student bodies at once in a fishing expedition for mp3 trading, etc., etc.)

There is an enormous amount of money to be made in the near term by plutocratic information restriction. Unfortunately the severe clampdowns threaten to change the model from wealth creation to wealth stagnation, and everyone loses as money transfer moves closer to zero-sum.

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. ... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." -- Bill Gates

That's true, but unfortunately the type of "political awareness" that arises out of social news sites seems to be guys sitting around on their computers and complaining about it. That doesn't help anything; it just pisses off ordinary people who complain that "these tech folks are so negative".

IMHO, Google's got the right idea. Become wealthy and powerful, and then you're in a position to lobby the government to change things. Unfortunately many people just sit back and complain about what Google's doing too...

Nonviolent noncooperation FTW. "Evil" schemes can't be implemented without programmers to do the work. Simply by being aware and choosing to work on something else -- GNU, Linux, your start-up, defeating DRM, anything open source -- you help swing the balance back in favor of everyone else.

Very depressing. I initially thought the change was going to be a good thing, but it has taken all of 2 days for the site to turn into Reddit. There seems to be much evidence (reddit, digg, slashdot) that social news just doesn't work.

Personally I don't see any problems with that, and in fact great hackers tend to have strong political point of views. To mention a few: Stallman (Free Software), Kapor (civil liberties advocate), and esr (libertarian, second amendment advocate).

Admins: please kill this political thread.

This is true, and an astute observation. It's also unavoidable - or at least one of the better alternatives.

Everybody has their own ideas of how things should be. In a society of 300 million people, that means 300 million different ideas. There will be some overlap, but obviously they won't all think the same things - then they'd really be brainwashed.

Unfortunately, there's only one way that things actually are. So somehow you've got to condense the myriad of different cultures, beliefs and desires into a single reality. Governments have relied on various ways of accomplishing this:

1.) Kill everyone who doesn't agree with the "official" culture. Eg. Rwanda, Bosnia, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, U.S. conquest of Native Americans

2.) Kill the most vocal proponents of alternate viewpoints, enough to terrorize the remaining citizens into keeping with the party line. Eg. modern Russia, several South American governments, apartheid South Africa

3.) Convince the population that eternal damnation awaits anyone who disagrees with the party line. Eg. the Catholic Church

4.) Split the population into many little populations, each of which can have their own reality. Eg. former Yugoslavia, former Soviet Union, American Civil War, Roman Empire. Problem with this is that each sub-state still wants to impose its reality upon its neighbors, so you often get continual warfare until one gobbles up the others.

5.) Convince a majority of the population that they really agree with you. This is the "discrimination and brainwashing" you refer to.

6.) Develop some fundamental principles that everybody agrees on, then agree to disagree on the specifics, knowing that eventually reality will come swing your way. Eg. the Enlightenment theory behind liberty and democracy

#6 seems to be the ideal, but it requires some cognitive dissonance, namely the ability to say "I disagree with what you're doing, but will defend your right to do it." Most people are not capable of this kind of cognitive dissonance - either they slip into "I will not defend your right to do this" and end up with #1 or #2, or they slip into "I agree with what you're doing" and end up with #5.

So #5 is the most stable system that a large civilization can enter. Most Western democracies actually function as a combination of #5 and #6, with the masses adjusting their beliefs to fit their leaders and the leaders themselves agreeing to disagree under fundamental principles. U.S. democracy is currently in danger because a disturbing number of "leaders" (on both sides) are suggesting #1 or #3, but the political party system is meant to encourage #6.

Incidentally, the same problem happens with multi-party governments. Most multi-party systems are actually run by coalitions, where a bunch of parties get together and say "Okay, I don't totally agree with all of your viewpoints, but for the sake of getting things done I'll let you do things your way."

Institutions, unlike people, can be truly idealistic. No NRA member is 100 percent devoted to guns. The NRA itself, however, is 100 percent so devoted. This same thing is possible with political parties. For instance, the "Nationalists" or "Communists" or "Fascists" or "Libertarians" can be counted on (to a large degree) to adhere to their platform.

In parlimentary systems, ideological parties, like the above, can get represented, and often make up the shaky coalition goverments that hold power. With the right kind of backstabbing, Nazis or Bolzhevics can wipe out their allies from within and seize control. Just not possible in the US...

In the US's winner-take-all system, the parties themselves must compromise on their plaform, and generally aim for about 50.1 percent of the vote--they'd rather 60 percent of gun-lovers than 100 percent, because the latter is unpalatable to the rest of their members. Therefore the crazy fringe of every issue is alienated. The GOP and Democrats are not really restricted to a given platform. This is why "GOP success" can never amount to a Fascist takeover, and why "Democrat success" can never amount to a Communist takeover.

* Suggestion:

When the admins see something as "off topic", perhaps they should enable a down arrow for that post only, allowing everyone else to decide for themselves.