tanadrin:

United Russia is like a lot of authoritarian political parties that aren’t the ruling party of constitutionally one-party states, in that AFAICT it has no real ideology. The party is just an apparatus of power/loyalty to the status quo. It doesn’t need a clear ideology, because ideology isn’t what it coheres around; it coheres around people willing to serve the party’s leadership in exchange for reward.

The problem with political parties in general is that they all tend to have a little bit of this–I think early suspicion toward political parties in the US was born out of the fact that this is how political factions in Britain worked, before clearly ideological parties developed. They often had a kind of ideological cast to their behavior, of course, but they were also political machines, in the Tammany Hall sense. With no ideology, of course, all that is left is corruption.

Americans shouldn’t be too smug–this is still how politics works in a lot of places in the US, like Chicago.

What frustrates me are tankies who try to justify constitutionally one-party states who monopolize elections by pointing to other ways policy is developed in their political apparatus, like in Cuba and China. And while it’s true that even within the restricted political expression permitted in those countries, and the closely supervised electoral processes, there is room both within and outside electoral politics to try to shift policy this way or that way, the monopoly on power and the problems of machine-style politics are still going to plague the political system, only they’ll be multiplied by the fact that the party and the state are part of the same hierarchy, and this arrangement is legally enshrined.

In those circumstances, even the biggest of big-tent parties can’t offer a meaningfully free choice, because it is beholden to a single leadership in the end. And that’s without positing forceful political repression. Which turns out to be necessary, since in a circumstance where a big-tent party wins electoral dominance, some ambitious group will cleave off and form a competitive party that operates within the new consensus, creating a new party system, or the parties will realign, as has happened repeatedly in the US.

But the US example shows that even two big-tent parties is a bad set of options that artificially narrows the Overton Window in ways that don’t reflect the diversity of opinion in the population–note the widespread popularity of legal weed, and the political impossibility of it happening at the federal level. Ideally, if you want a political system that offers meaningful choice, you need a system that 1) incentivizes many competitive parties, and 2) disadvantages machine politics. A proportional parliamentary system with an independent judiciary and independent election oversight is a good start. FPTP, executive presidencies, one-party systems (de facto or de jure), two-party systems, and a politicized judiciary or election monitoring authority, should all be regarded with extreme skepticism.

Many American cities function on a one-party basis with politicking confined within a Democratic Party, even in the case of politicians and policies that would be coded Republican at higher levels.

Also, the American occupation of Japan induced the Liberal and Democratic parties to merge into the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled through the Cold War on a fairly nonideological spoils system with personal cliques taking turns forming administrations, mostly rotating every MP through cabinet positions, because had they remained separate the Communist Party would be the largest individual party and hard to freeze out. (The multimember districting system also limited how many seats the urban proletariat could control with a simple majority, while empowering conservative pluralities in rural seats)