I live in Australia where voting is mandatory. My belief is that this tends to mitigate the appeal to extremes because a majority of the voting public tends to be relatively centrist on most issues, meaning that a strategy of appealing to the extremes, will lose you the valuable middle. It tends not be as much of a winning strategy here as it does in the US. Of course, the downside is that change is often very incremental. As I get older though, I'm finding that's not such a bad thing. Democracy can withstand small perturbations and stay relatively stable.
Centrism is inherently conservative, and will lean towards whatever the current system is. A “centrist” party in the Soviet Union would be just another communist party, and a centrist party in Australia is likewise just another capitalist party. Likewise a centrist party in the USA would be another run of the mill capitalist, pro-military, pro-police. pro-surveillance. It would basically just be the current Democratic party except it wouldn’t fight for immigration rights, abortion rights, nor gay rights. A lack of centrist parties is not what is wrong with American politics currently.
>It would basically just be the current Democratic party except it wouldn’t fight for immigration rights, abortion rights, nor gay rights. A lack of centrist parties is not what is wrong with American politics currently.
The reason the right has been so successful is because these policies have been made divisive in an ongoing culture war.
This is weakening the US as a whole.
To fix it, first dismantle the structures that are fueling the culture war. And the only way to do this is to co-op the middle.
The Soviet Union was not a multi-party democracy so I agree with you but it’s not relevant to the point I was making. With respect to the US, my guess is what‘s happened is both parties have drifted in the same direction, so the position of the “centre” (in the absence of mandatory voting defined as the median between the two parties rather than the median of the population) has moved too. Of course, I only have remote observer status - I’m not living it like most of those present in this discussion are.
