Thoughts On Democracy

How to govern society is one of the oldest philosophical problems. While there aren’t any perfect solutions that can completely eliminate corruption, there are some pragmatic principles and heuristics that we can follow to generate a better society.

Collective values are determined by how many people support said values, so this gives the basic intuition for why democracy or majority voting has been so widely chosen to resolve societal conflicts.

Democracy is prevalent in Western societies today because it’s a way to form compromises between opposing political ideologies, platforms, and ethics. This is the only reason why the Democrats would let Donald Trump be the president of the US, or why Republicans would let Joe Biden be the president of the US, or why any political faction would put up with laws, legislation, politicians, etc. that they detest.

All political systems are kratocratic oligarchies, regardless of how they present themselves. Leaders of centralized systems know almost nothing about a lot of things, rather than a lot about a few things. It’s not possible for a single person to rule an entire country all by themselves because they need subordinates who will enforce their rule of law. Likewise, it’s equally impossible for a democracy to work effectively unless it has representatives and a hierarchy of other government officials. It has to be that way, but it also creates problems with running the society.

Relevant Humorous Meme

Note: I have more to say about democracy and what could be done to replace/reform it. It will take time to write, but I will publish my other thoughts eventually.

A disproportionate number of politicians are lawyers. Some reasons for that are:

• One who is versed in law has an advantage in making laws over one who doesn’t.
• Lawyers, on average, make more money than many other professions, and campaigning is expensive.
• Lawyering typically involves finding ways around things and talking to people, useful political skills.
• Lawyers are likely to know some of the regulators, judges, and state prosecutors as part of their job. Or they may know how to deal with them.
• Lawyers have relatively greater autonomy for their jobs, especially if they run their own law firm. This autonomy gives them a Plan B when they run for political offices. If they fail to win an election, then they can fall back on their law firm to continue making money. If they would rather serve in a political office, then they can close or leave their law firm.

There are probably other reasons as well.

In my opinion, these are among the best videos that John Stossel ever made.

• Campaign Technology - John Stossel.
• Campaign Moments and Message - John Stossel.
• How Debates Are Won - John Stossel.
• The Selfish Ledger - Google.

The gist of these videos is:

1. Modern campaigning involves more data mining and analysis than ever, which makes it easy for candidates to manipulate voters and figure out what makes them tick.
2. The selective media attention of different campaign moments and the intense media scrutiny of political gaffes makes it difficult for people to promote the issues that matter most.
3. Debates are not an effective format for understanding candidates. The design of debates incentivizes candidates to interrupt each other to get their message across and make others look bad, so it’s no surprise that that’s what tends to happen. When a debate ends, the media tends to fixate on a handful of memorable moments, while ignoring everything else, so that’s what most people do as well.
4. Elections are rigged by the media and the establishment against less popular candidates. All of these problems are amplified for presidential elections.

See: Democracy is a Tragedy of the Commons - Blithering Genius.

Blithering Genius’s essay pinpoints why democracy doesn’t work. Society is failing to solve the problems with the modern world, and democracy is making some of the problems even worse. Democracy is not capable of solving long-term problems. Voters care more about instant gratification. Everybody would prefer that the government serves their own interests, even if satisfying their interests conflicts with other people’s interests.

Welfare and democracy don’t mix. Welfare is an effective way for politicians to buy votes. When democracy and welfare exist together, the tendency is that welfare continuously increases. The result is massive debt. This is especially problematic when the working populations of developed countries are expected to significantly increase in the future. It will take a very long time for the next generations of taxpayers won’t be able to easily pay back the debt generated over the last several decades. This is perhaps the most straight-forward example that democracy is a tragedy of the commons.

When most people tell others to “go vote”, they don’t really mean “go vote”. What they’re really saying is “go vote for my guy”. For example, young people tend to vote Democrat, so Democrats will send out hordes of people to college campuses to sign people up, drive them to polls, etc, while Republicans will try to keep college students from voting by making it arbitrarily difficult. Likewise, “Pro-voting” organizations typically target young people and POC, but you’ll never see them visiting rural America or manufacturing and construction sites to get those demographics to vote, and it’s not hard to figure out why. None of it is driven by genuine pro or anti voting sentiment. It’s all just gamesmanship.

The governments needs a massive overhaul and a rational replacement for democracy, if we are ever going to solve the problems of the modern world.

It is peculiar how the legislative and jury processes are so radically different from each other. In a democracy, decisions are allowed to be based on partisanship, emotions, conflicts of interest, and personal morals. And that’s even strongly encouraged. The selection process for the people who make legislative decisions regarding society is also determined by election campaigns and voting.

On the other hand, the decision-making process in the court system is completely different. People are forbidden from being selected to make decisions if they have a conflict of interest in deciding the verdict, or if they are likely to be influenced by their emotions, morals, and personal biases. In addition, the selection process for the people who make decisions is also determined by random selection (sortition), in contrast to the voting system used by democracies.

It’s odd that most people never question why these decision making processes are so different from each other. Yes, they belong to different branches of government, but they are both making important decisions about society. Besides the appeal that a random selection of people on the jury can seem more fair and unbiased, I can’t think of many other reasons why the decision-making processes for the legislature and court system should be much different from each other.

How many things can go wrong with a system that emphasizes reason, logic, and non-partisanship? By contrast, there are easily thousands of different ways for a system to make mistake when it allows emotions, partisanship, non-thorough evaluation of the evidence, and conflicts of self-interest to influence the government’s decision making. We can observe this in real life. Traditional democracy has failed to solve the problems of modernity because it is a tragedy of the commons. Democratic legislatures should work more similarly to the judicial system.

Most importantly, the oligarchical structure of a society should be meritocratic. Due to the paradox of meritocracy, meritocratic societies often fail to be completely meritocratic in the long-term. However, there is a cycle involving a stabilizing feedback loop that helps to eventually restore meritocratic norms, through reform and/or revolt.

The pool of potential government officials must be limited to people who have the right merits, knowledge, and values for making decisions that will benefit society as a whole. I will not support any power structure that doesn’t use merit to select the people who get placed in the structure.

The pool of potential government officials should be limited to: philosophers, STEM workers, and experts on world-centric and human-centric sciences. There would also be restrictions on who can serve in which branches or government agencies, depending on their credentials and expertise. Government officials should be required to be: legal adults, law-abiding, tax-payers, parents, Pragmatopians, able to ace cognitive exams, have high social value, etc. Deciding exactly who can be included inside the pool could be another issue, but it would replace all the issues and policy debates involving the electoral process. Juries usually don’t have too much trouble selecting qualified jurors, so I suspect that a meritocratic system wouldn’t have many troubles either.

While sortition would be mostly useless by itself, it could help meritocratic governments stay meritocratic. Historically, most meritocracies eventually get corrupted. Randomly selecting government officials from a pool of high-merit people with sortition could reduce that likelihood.

It may be better if all government actions were nominally done on behalf of the so-called administration, rather than the head of government. This would causeless intelligent people to better understand that the entire administration (or at least multiple people) do government actions, rather than a single person or a metonym.

People who get caught up in my-guy attitudes almost never had any principled positions, much less original ideas to begin with. I say this, given that I have experience from my past self.

Sortition would have many advantages for creating governments:

• The government would be run by a representative cross-section sample of the population.
• No money tied to elections.
• No more incumbents, politicians, or political dynasties.
• Weaker political parties.
• “My Guy” attitudes among the people would be eliminated.
• There would be less of a social distinction between governors and non-governors.

Note: Sortition is technically election-free, since the government representatives are selected by a cross-sectional lottery. “Election” implies that the people chose the representatives.

The main disadvantage is that Sortition will not solve anything by itself. Under Sortition, democracy would still be a tragedy of the commons. The government would still be compromised by conflicts of interest, and it would encounter the Normie Problem. Without meritocratic reforms, sortition probably won’t improve anything. Without meritocracy, Sortition will only select qualified people to run the government in society’s interests if there’s a lot of luck, and we cannot count on that.

Also See:

• Wikipedia: Meritocracy.
• Wikipedia: History of Meritocracy.
• Wikipedia: Sortition.
• Wikipedia: Weighted Voting.
• Wikipedia: Wisdom of the Crowd.

See: To Build a Better Ballot - Nicky Case.

As we can see from Nicky Case’s To Build a Better Ballot interactive guide and simulators, there are tradeoffs to all other electoral alternatives to FPTP. There is no perfect voting system.

• If we switch to Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), then we will lose transparency and many voters will still be dissatisfied due to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.
• If we switch to Borda Counting, it will be possible for Reverse Spoiler Effects to happen.
• The Condorcet Method is fairer, but it’s also more complicated, and it also requiring falling back to a different voting system when it fails to find a winner (there’s a tie).
• Kenneth Arrow and Nikki case both endorsed score voting or approval voting over other methods, but we have to keep in mind that they are both left-leaning. What left-leaning people fail to understand is that humans are selfish, so strategic voting is always going to be the most popular voting bias that people have by default. Again, democracy is a tragedy of the commons. As explained by Nicky Case, neither Approval Voting nor Scoring Voting will work correctly if people vote strategically.
• And even if we assume that strategic voting won’t become the dominant form of voting, approval and score voting still both have anti-democratic flaws.

It’s possible that non-FPTP systems would’ve selected better candidates for the 2016, 2020, and 2024 US Presidential elections. But it’s also likely that they would’ve selected worse candidates in other elections, aside from the Condorcet Method.

Since people are losing faith in democracy these days, it seems probable that more people will advocate switching to a different type of voting system in the future, rather than replacing democracy altogether. I don’t know what voting system that may be, but I’m confident that it won’t change or improve much of anything unless it emphasizes meritocracy. Electoral voting is also irrelevant if we switch to meritocracy & sortition, which is what I believe would be best for society.

Nevertheless, if we assume that majority rule is always best, and if society does insist on replacing FPTP with a different electoral method, then I think the Condorcet Method would probably be the best replacement to FPTP and IRV. Approval voting and score voting would probably be best for situations where strategic voting is unlikely to occur.

For starters, most under-represented ideologues who are keen to replace FPTP overlook that their democratically under-represented political opposites will also gain more representation too if FPTP is replaced. This would cancel out almost anything that they could hope to gain. For instance, when I was Libertarian, I used to believe that the United States would be better off it eliminated FPTP since that would enable Libertarians to gain greater representation in the Government, but once I realized that opposing ideologies like the Social Democrats, Green Party members, Neoliberals, Pro-Trumpers, the Religious Right, etc would also gain greater representation, I realized that this would be a loss cause. The result would only be political gridlock, and it wouldn’t be any different than how the Libertarians already have their own small faction inside the Republican Party. The same reasoning applies to other democratically under-represented political factions.

In a sense, proportional representation already exists in FPTP, but in a different way. Instead of having proportional representation inside the government’s legislature as a whole, political factions have approximate proportional representation inside the main political parties. For example, the Republican Party in the United States consists of factions such as conservatives (represented in Congress by the Republican Study Committee and the Freedom Caucus), moderates (represented in Congress by the Republican Governance Group), libertarians (represented in Congress by the Republican Liberty Caucus), Pro-Trumpers, etc. Likewise, the Democratic Party of the United States consists of factions like the Blue Dog Coalition representing conservative and moderate Democrats, the New Democrat Coalition representing moderate and liberal Democrats, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus representing liberal and progressive Democrats. The popularity of these factions within their big tent political parties approximately reflects how popular they are among voters. So FPTP doesn’t really reduce the range of acceptable political thought within the status quo after all.

It’s also possible that proportional representation could help prevent more political extreme ideas from being passed by the legislature. In a two-party system, voters either have to put up with two ideological extremes and pander to them, or join the opposite party (unlikely) or start a futile third party. Neither of these are good options for moderate voters. Nowadays, the two main parties tend to be steered from one end or the other, especially if they’re combating the “lesser of two evils”. In a proportional representation system, each these factions can run their own smaller party. Since none of the parties have a large portion, more extreme parties have less power. I view this to be the main benefit of replacing FPTP with proportional representation, but I still don’t think it will improve many things.

The support for proportional representation is connected to the Libertarian support for more smaller states, rather than nation states. Behind both positions, the idea is that having smaller political forces will widen the range of political opinion and give people more political choice. Both positions are impractical for similar reasons. Just as there’s already many lower levels of government that are administered by higher levels of government, there’s also political factions that coalesce into political parties and other coalitions. It’s natural for political forces to congregate together. Trying to break up higher levels will still lead to de facto coalitions, while failing to change much of anything. More generally, a failure to recognize this is a failure to do second order thinking.

Sometimes, proportional representation can cause political grid-locking. One of the reasons why the Weimar Republic failed was that it had a proportional representation democracy that caused gridlock within the legislature, thus causing political power to transfer to the executive branch in order to actually get anything done. Of course, proportional representation isn’t the only thing that can cause gridlock in governments. Many other things can cause it. Some may also even view it to be a feature in some cases to have a slower, less volatile political process. These are things to keep in mind if a country switches to proportional representation.

Related: The Deep State and Myth of Democracy.

These ideas that could improve our current democracies, without overhauling the electoral system:

• Have more educated voters (see: Why It’s So Difficult To Change People’s Minds).
• Restructure the government in a way that discourages corruption and corporatocracy.
• Implement voter-ID laws with government-issued ID cards (free for all citizens).
• Change presidential democracies to the parliamentary democracies.
• Replace the electoral college with the popular vote.
• Shorten The Campaign Trail.
• Implement consecutive and/or lifetime term-limits for all legislative and bureacratic offices.
• Pass laws regulating campaign finance.
• Completely eliminate gerrymandering.
  • One idea is that we could remove party affiliations at the time of voter registration. Home addresses would not be tracked on ballots. Voter ID is done through government-issued ID cards, but does not require you to retain the information together. Now politicians don’t know where you live and can’t draw districts with biases.
  • However, this could be problematic, since the point of knowing where voters live is to prove that which city and state they reside in.
• There should be the politician cut-off age around the retirement age.
  • This would prevent the likelihood that people with dementia (e.g. Joe Biden), politicians with cognitive problems (e.g. John Fetterman, Dianne Feinstein, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, etc), or people with perverse incentives get elected.
  • Many of these elderly politicians don’t have to worry about the consequences of their decisions because they’ll be dead soon enough.
• Localism.
• Et Cetera.

It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes – Joseph Stalin

Democracies would improve to some extent if the campaigning process for all political offices was shorter and more fast-paced. The US presidential election cycle goes as follows:

• A newly elected candidate works for ~2 years as the candidate, during which they tend to be the most productive and gradually build up support for running for re-election, if they choose to do so.
• During the third year, potential candidates start debating against their competitors on national television to help determine who will run for the primaries and caucuses in the fourth year.
• During the fourth year, candidates prepare for the state primaries and caucuses, starting in Iowa on January 15. The candidate is usually determined by early March, since the first Tuesday in March is Super Tuesday, where 15 states run their caucuses and primaries all at once and candidates compete for one-third of the delegate votes for receiving the nominations of their respective parties.
• Between early March and early November, primaries and caucuses continue for the rest of the country, but they’re mostly pointless since the party nominees are usually already chosen by then. The nominees are then officially nominated in June, campaign rallies are scheduled across the country, and three finalist debates take place in the 1-2 months before the election. This 8-month window is far too long. During the fourth year, the president/finalist is generally less productive than at any other point in their term, since they focus more on campaigning and less on doing things that a president/politician should do.

The long campaigning process causes less work to get done, since politicians spend more time on the campaign trail and less time doing actual work. More talk, less action. Another thing is that since the campaigning process is so long, it discourages some people from participating in it since it raises the opportunity cost of competing in an election. Shorter campaigning processes would thus reduce the opportunity cost of competing in an election, which may incentivize a more diverse set of candidates to run for office.

It would be best if there was no more than 1 month for party candidates to debate, 1-2 months for primaries and caucuses, and 2 months for official nominations, finalist debates, and the finalist election.

Election day should also occur before tax collecting day, so that voters think more about reducing taxes and deficit spending.

Although I haven’t read the book itself, I agree with pretty much all the arguments against Presidential Democracies that are stated in this Wikipedia summary of the book: Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People by Dana D. Nelson.

Presidential elections are also pointless if the president doesn’t control most of the bureaucracy. The president has the power to select the department secretaries of the presidential cabinet. But a president can’t eliminate most of the corruption in the system unless he fires and replaces most of the workers in the departments and government agencies. US presidents are also limited to 4-8 years in office, whereas most government officials work usually within the government for decades. A true anti-establishment president thus wouldn’t have enough time to fundamentally change government agencies.

Donald Trump said that he would “Drain the Swamp” in 2016, and he failed to do that. (I also doubt that he ever had any real intentions of “draining the swamp”.) Regardless, he didn’t change much of anything. Once his term was over, most of the bureaucracy remained opposed to him and his policies. It could be the Swamp would fight back if the President tries to drain it, but we’ll probably never know. Regardless, parliamentary democracies seem to give the people greater control over the government. In the United Kingdom, the political leaders are the government, and the bureaucracy (civil service) is the administration. In the United States, the political leaders are the administration, and the civil service is the government.

Another downside of presidential democracies is that they cause people to only focus on one big election at the national level, and less on state and local elections. Since people have selective attention, and can therefore only focus on a few elections at a time, it is disadvantageous to the democracy’s functioning when everybody focuses on just one election for only one office every four years. It would be better if people focused on the state and local elections that could potentially affect them even more. Parliamentary democracies are better for this.

Although parliamentary democracies tend to be better than presidential democracies, it probably wouldn’t have made much historical difference if the United States had a parliament until the 1970s. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the US could’ve removed Jimmy Carter from office if it had a parliamentary democracy instead. Up until that point, presidential democracies were about as good as parliamentary ones. The reasons why this eventually changed are:

1. The country elected a weak head of government who couldn’t leave office until his term was over.
2. This was long before the Internet started. The Internet has caused democratic backsliding by isolating people into political ideologies in their own online Internet bubbles and echo chambers, This makes the presidential system less stable since more attention started being focused on the President and viewing the Presidency as the key to fixing all the countries problems.
3. Power started shifting towards the Presidency, in large part because the Presidency and its executive orders have become the only fast and effective way to change the federal law of the land due to the democratic backsliding and inability of political cliques to compromise with each other.

Private entities could use democracies as a means of compromise under limited circumstances. In situations where there is no single right answer and/or there are different competing values and value systems, democracies are often proposed as a potential solution. However, Reason is a superior decision maker to Democracy, so decisions should made with Reason instead of Democracy whenever possible.

Democracy an be a solution for resolving multiple different values, perspectives, and ideologies, as imperfect as it may be. Nevertheless, I agree with all the criticisms in The Deep State and Myth of Democracy, and I believe that we can make a system with similarities to democracy that is still better than anything that’s ever been tried before.

See: To Build a Better Ballot - Nicky Case.

Approval Voting: For every choice/option/candidate, everybody votes yes or no to signal whether or not they approve of the option. The option(s) with the most approvals is/are selected. People can vote multiple times, vote once, or not vote at all. This method is quick, simple, will work for most situations, and is better than first past the post voting. CGP Grey has a video explaining how Approval Voting works.

Single Transferable Voting: The single transferable vote (STV) is a voting system designed to achieve proportional representation through ranked voting in multi-seat organizations. Under STV, an elector (voter) has a single vote that is initially allocated to their most preferred candidate. Votes are totaled and a quota (the number of votes required to win a seat) derived. If their candidate achieves quota, he/she is elected and in some STV systems any surplus vote is transferred to other candidates in proportion to the voters’ stated preferences. If more candidates than seats remain, the bottom candidate is eliminated with his/her votes being transferred to other candidates as determined by the voters’ stated preferences. These elections and eliminations, and vote transfers if applicable, continue until there are only as many candidates as there are unfilled seats.

It depends. It would probably decrease polarization within states, while increasing it between states.

Most people across the country already live in echo chambers thanks to the Internet. So, redrawing state borders isn’t going to change that much at all.

Granting greater autonomy to more separatist regions often tends to reduce polarization within those regions, hence why many countries do it. It follows that redrawing state borders would reduce polarization within states as well. However, granting autonomy to a separatist region could create tensions between that region and the rest of the country, depending on the rights and obligations between the two. For example, there is tension between Quebec and Canada, Catalonia and Spain, Russia and Chechnya, etc.

The state who is being seceded from (usually blue) would be more polarized on the federal level, and less polarized on the state level. Without the more rural conservative region(s) to balance out blue states on the state level, the leftist urban centers would probably even more radical politics than before on the state level. Redrawing state borders would also reduce polarization in the rural areas, since those people would be able to live under the state of their choice.

Moving Oregon’s border to form Greater Idaho would also create a precedent for other states to make similarly radical border changes. Again, most of the political tension would occur on the federal level, unless reforms are made to address it (e.g. switching to a parliament).

Relevant: Laboratories of Democracy - Wikipedia.

Redrawing state boundaries could be called “state-level gerrymandering”. But the key difference is that petitions to move state boundaries would have the support of the people who want to secede from a state and join another one instead. On the other hand, gerrymandering tends to be driven by politicians who want to gain an upper-hand in elections.

We can think about two related phenomena:

• People moving to states that better conform with their political beliefs.
• People moving state boundaries so that their governments better conform with their political beliefs.

Most people are unlikely to label the former as gerrymandering, although some people might label the latter as gerrymandering. Regardless, both of these phenomena are symptoms and reactions to political polarization.

Letting people move from one state to another would reduce polarization, rather than increase it. If people are prevented from moving to the state that they want to live in, then that would increase political polarization because some people would become more frustrated. Letting those people migrate between states thus appeases them and reduces tension, across all levels of government.

Politically-motivated migrations can also change the politics of states. Like how immigration to Texas has actually been keeping the state red. Or how Florida became red due to older, conservative people migrating to Florida.

If all the red areas of states seceded from their urban centers, then political representation in the US Senate would remain the same, if no new states are created. I hypothesize that it could slightly increase Republican representation in the House of Representatives, since many red states don’t have enough people to get another representative.

Aside from that, representation in both congressional chambers would remain the same, if state borders were redrawn. If a Republican representative from an area of a blue state switches to representing an area of red state instead, then the number of Republican and Democrat representatives would largely stay the same.

The US presidency is determined by the Electoral College system. So, increasing the population of red states while decreasing the population of blue states would cause red states to have more electoral votes, which would make Republicans more likely to win the presidency in elections. This would be the greatest effect of the “gerrymandering” within the US Federal Government.

The leftists and the blue states would obviously be the most upset about this, unless the Electoral College system was replaced by a popular voting system. Better yet, the US should switch to a parliament, rather than a presidency. If either of those reforms were installed, then I don’t think redrawing state boundaries should be considered “gerrymandering” since it largely wouldn’t change political representation within the federal government, although it would generally increase people’s satisfactions with their state governments.

That seems unlikely. For example, Japan is a one-party state, and it is relatively low in corruption. A key distinction should be made regarding why a jurisdiction is a one-party state. One-party states caused by Communist or authoritarian regimes are going to be corrupt regardless. Whereas one-party states caused by voter preferences are not necessarily going to be corrupt. It’s also conceivable that the corruption levels of governments are probably influenced by population genetics to some extent.

This also depends on what is considered to be “corruption”. Almost everybody would agree that benefiting oneself at the expense of the rest of society is corruption. Beyond that, a lot of corruption seems to depend on a person’s perspective. Is a politician who gives into the demands of the voters “corrupt”, even if will make the country unsustainable in the future and will hurt the future of the short-sighted voters? Is a politician “corrupt” if he bites the bullet and tries to make the country more sustainable, at odds with the people? My preference is to define corruption according to the long-term interests of the country, rather than the short-term interests.

If the Greater Idaho and Lesser Oregon movement succeeds and the Oregon-Idaho border is shifted, then there are other political issues that must be addressed or dealt with as well:

• The taxes and subsidies of Eastern Oregon.
• The American Indian reservations in Eastern Oregon would now be located in Idaho.
• The debt of Oregon and Idaho would have to be restructured to account for Eastern Oregon’s share of Oregon’s debt.
• Many maps would have to be redrawn.

Regardless of whether redrawing state boundaries would increase or decrease political polarization, the US and the rest of the West are destined to decline and eventually destroy themselves regardless. In the long term, this issue won’t have too much importance or significance for changing the trajectory of the future.

The Nazis attempted a revolutionary strategy when they tried to overthrow the government during the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The revolutionary approach failed, so they decided to obtain power via reformist and legal means instead. In the May 1928 federal election, they only achieved 2.6% of the vote, but then they formed a temporary alliance with the larger and less extremist German National People’s Party (DNVP). This alliance (as well as the onset of the Great Depression and other things) contributed to weakening the DNVP’s share of the vote in the September 1930 election to 7%, while boosting the Nazis to win 18.2% of the vote that same year. By temporarily using a moderated Big Tent approach, the Nazis gained the propulsion that they needed to seize power and start radicalizing towards their true ambitions.

Wikipedia Excerpt about how Ernst Röhm wanted to create an even more radical version of the Nazi Party, which was one reason why Hitler purged him and other members of the Sturmabteilung.

After their victory in the 1933 election, some of the Nazis were plotting to create an even more radical version of the Nazi Party that would seize power via a coup d’état and start a war. Hitler wouldn’t allow this though, so he ordered the assassination of Ernst Röhm in order to maintain his grip on power. It’s possible that might have prevented the Nazis from starting WWII on an earlier date. If that’s true, then it was a smart move for the Nazis to take a moderate position on politics for the time being while gradually radicalizing.

Many Ancaps try to recruit Libertarians into becoming Ancaps, but they can’t promote Anarcho-Capitalism or Voluntaryism directly because then their movements would be too small and would have less influence. For this reason, many Ancaps participate within and vote for Libertarian political parties. They may prefer to start Anarcho-Capitalist political parties from the very beginning, but there’s no chance that they would ever gain much traction because that would been too extremist for many Libertarians and anti-Anarchists to ever consider joining, and it might even be illegal to have anarchist political parties or organizations in some countries.

Amanda Sukenick and other Efilists are trying to co-opt the much larger Anti-Natalism movement and “Efilize the Anti-Natalism movement from within”, in an effort to recruit more potential Efilists. If the Efilism movement ever grows large enough, Sukenick is definitely going to stop promoting Anti-Natalist activism and start pushing Efilist activism instead. She has said all this on video.

All political factions that are apart of a larger, more moderate coalition are also using the Big Tent Strategy to gain power and achieve some of their objectives, even though it requires sacrificing their more radical yearnings. Every faction in the coalition is only part of the coalition for convenience, and if any of the factions see an opportunity to persuade, influence, or manipulate the others towards their cause, they’ll readily do so. Whenever a bunch of factions unite together to form a coalition, each faction is hoping to eventually out-compete the other factions for control of the entire coalition once the coalition’s goal is finished.

Another example: Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism (TERF) and Liberal Feminism disagree on sex work, trans issues, etc. But they’re united on issues that benefit women at the expense of men.

Religions (and ideologies in general) have a tendency to branch off into different subgroups over time.

• Judaism branched off into Christianity, which branched off into Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, Protestantism, Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientism, Seventh Day Adventists, etc.
• Islam branched off into Sunni Islam, Shiism, Ibadi Islam, etc.
• Hinduism branched into many different local beliefs.
• Buddhism branched into Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana Buddhism.

In a sense, each one of these major world religions can be considered a big tent of sorts, especially from the perspectives of outsiders. But internally within each tent, some (perhaps most) of the people in each of the different sects don’t see members of the other sects as belonging to the same religion. For instance, many Sunni Muslims don’t consider Shiite Muslims to be true Muslims and they view them as belonging to an entirely different religion. The same goes for how Catholics often view Protestants, how Christians often view Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on. Just like every big tent, there are different factions inside the tent that gatekeep and insist that the other factions under the tent are not true believers. On the other hand, outsiders that oppose the big tent movements in question will tend to view and treat all the factions of the tent as belonging to the same ideology, as outsiders are less likely to understand what makes each of the different factions different from each other.

Ideologies need labels in order to propagate effectively since labels define the “in-group” and the “out-group”. Being able to identify with an already established label can help an ideology propagate better (as opposed to a newly made-up label), which may help to explain why Shiites are likely to identify themselves as legitimate Muslims and why Protestants view their religion as having more similarities than differences to Catholicism, even though Shiism and Protestantism both branched off an already established religion whose members are more likely to see the new movements as being heresy.

Wikipedia: Intragroup Conflict.

Wikipedia: The Narcissism of Small Differences.

Wikipedia: Sectarianism.

Wikipedia: Neotribalism.

When a big tent movement arises, it’s pretty typical for the tent’s ideology and ideals to evolve over time or get watered down, especially if it propagates to many different peoples in high numbers. The bigger the tent, the more likely some faction and/or another is going to diverge into a distinctly different ideology that only has veins of similarity to the original big tent. At the same time however, a lot of what enables a successful big tent movement to propagate effectively comes from its number of members. Big Tents are best at accomplishing short-term coalition goals and propagating core ideas to a somewhat wider range of people, but they will always have the downside that the perceived differences between the tent’s members will come to outweigh their similarities and cause the tent to evolve, diverge, or fall apart entirely from within.