Robert Goodman wrote to Frank Reichert:
I can say that as it currently stands w.r.t. #1, the party systems are relatively weak in the USA compared to those in most other countries whose politics I've read of. The decline in the strength of the party systems in the USA over the past century or less has been remarked about widely by political scientists. It should be noted that the founders of the USA expressed a desire to forestall the development of "faction", and if they were sincere in that abstract desire they may well have applauded that recent trend.
I doubt they would applaud the recent trend of making personal destruction of an opponent rather than discussion of ideas as a major means to gain election. Even where there is something along the lines of one-party rule, there are still factions; they are just factions within a party.
BTW, I missed at least one posting by Robert and one by Frank in this thread (just didn't show up in my Inbox), so I'm following the conversation (which I started) through their follow-ups. I missed in particular the transition from my original point to this one.
However, there is considerable variation from state to state in the strength of party systems w.r.t. campaigns and/or governance. For instance, NY & NJ, at least, are said to have tightly controlled parties in their state legislatures, with most important issues decided by party-line votes, and members of the assembly & senate of these states being subject to stringent discipline by the respective party leaders among them.
In PA, there was a vote to jack up state legislators' salaries. The Dems who voted no lost committee assignments and other perks. There were, AFAIK, no penalities imposed on Republicans voting no. They repealed a flagrantly unconstitutional part of the pay raise yesterday, but the rest is still there.
When it comes to question #2, I don't know whether the USA is particularly an outlier. It seems to me that the richer a country is, the less urgent politics appear to the voters, and the more the political class look to politics as make-work for them, increasingly divorced from ideology or other principles. On that scale the USA is far along merely because we're so rich, not because we're away from that correlation.
I'd agree with that.
>Now the question. If you are a Libertarian in Hawaii, or in >Idaho, what do you do? If you're a Libertarian, i.e. a member of the Libertarian Party, I suggest you quit it in Hawaii as much as anywhere else! But there's still plenty you can do as a libertarian without having your own political party. There are many issues on which the Democrats in HI or the Republicans in ID are at equipoise -- that is, that party's leadership and/or grass roots not coming down decisively on either side of. That's where you have leverage, even in the relatively short run of local & state-level politics.
This is indeed the key to influencing policy. Join whichever party you can best stomach and which is appropriate for your area and try to swing endorsements to the more libertarian candidate. In my part of central PA, people who don't get party endorsements drop out of the race.
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