You could also argue that elections are the mind-killer - if the popularity of opinions among the population had little or no impact on who got in power, people wouldn't get worked up as much about them. I wonder if the republic of Venice - with it's mix of elections and random choice - had more or less factionalism than modern western societies do (I would guess it wasn't as widespread as ours, a bit like most Chinese people don't have strong political ideologies, but the educated are more likely to).
For similar reasons, you could argue that karma on lesswrong (and reddit) is a small mind-killer.
If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you'd heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise. Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.
That's because knowing party affiliation actually gives you some information about the candidate (the more parties in the election, the more information you get).
If you want to know what kind of policies candidate Joe is likely to enact, you'll probably get a better guess by looking at which policies were enacted by candidates of the same party as candidate Joe, than by listening to his speeches (which are likely to be mostly filled with platitudes and applause lights).
The budget stalemate in the US Congress was caused entirely by blocks of voters and representatives that coalesced around strong sets of opinions that few people would have come up with on their own, and by political party leaders forcing representatives in their parties to toe the party line. Politics isn't the mind killer. Political parties are the mind-killer.
Parties are also notorious for obliterating information in elections, as well as for encouraging voters to vote sans information. If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you'd heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise. Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.
For discussion:
We want the freedom to form groups that promote political concerns. But it would be possible to keep these groups at a greater distance from elected representatives. Candidates for office could be forbidden from endorsing a particular party. The Congress could be forbidden from basing any procedural rules on party affiliation. Political parties could be forbidden from making large donations to election campaigns, or sponsoring advertising. That's not so different from what we do today with religious groups, which are not much different from political parties.
Political parties are currently officially part of Congress' operation, even though they're not in the constitution. There are all sorts of Congressional rules specifying how the parties interact, who gets to choose committee members, who runs the House and Senate floors, etc. A party leader can punish a representative who doesn't toe the line with many incentives and disincentives.
Make that illegal. Make persecuting a representative for party-based reasons have the same legal standing as persecuting a representative for religious reasons.
I will ignore comments saying "you're an intellectual dreamer", for the usual reasons.