Followup to: The Two-Party Swindle, The American System and Misleading Labels

If evolutionary psychology could be simplified down to one sentence (which it can't), it would be: "Our instincts are adaptations that increased fitness in the ancestral environment, and we go on feeling that way regardless of whether it increases fitness today." Sex with condoms, tastes for sugar and fat, etc.

In the ancestral environment, there was no such thing as voter confidentiality. If you backed a power faction in your hunter-gatherer band, everyone knew which side you'd picked. The penalty for choosing the losing side could easily be death.

Our emotions are shaped to steer us through hunter-gatherer life, not life in the modern world. It should be no surprise, then, that when people choose political sides, they feel drawn to the faction that seems stronger, better positioned to win. Even when voting is confidential. Just as people enjoy sex, even when using contraception.

(George Orwell had a few words to say in "Raffles and Miss Blandish" about where the admiration of power can go. The danger, not of lusting for power, but just of feeling drawn to it.)

In a recent special election for California governor, the usual lock of the party structure broke down - they neglected to block that special case, and so you could get in with 65 signatures and $3500. As a result there were 135 candidates.

With 135 candidates, one might have thought there would be an opportunity for some genuine voter choice - a lower barrier to entry, which would create a chance to elect an exceptionally competent governor. However, the media immediately swung into action and decided that only a tiny fraction of these candidates would be allowed to get any publicity. Which ones? Why, the ones who already had name recognition! Those, after all, were the candidates who were likely to win, so those were the ones which the media reported on.

Amazingly, the media collectively exerted such tremendous power, in nearly perfect coordination, without deliberate intention (conspiracies are generally much less necessary than believed). They genuinely thought, I think, that they were reporting the news rather than making it. Did it even occur to them that the entire business was self-referential? Did any...

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