Rimu's blog

The political terms Left and Right were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in the Estates General; those who sat on the left generally supported the radical changes of the revolution, including the creation of a republic and secularisation. The left represented the values of the Enlightenment - universal human rights, rationalism, science and progress. The right were the old school - aristocratic, feudal and religious.

In that situation, an electoral system like FPP is no problem because there are only two ideologies to choose from and FPP only enables two parties. Also a system that forces two parties to coalesce is a good thing if there are only two ideologies in play as the extra push towards two options has the welcome side-effect of stopping individual egos who may want to start their own movement, centred around themselves. So when democracy is young and unstable the extra structure forced by the limiting of options is a good thing.

Fast forward 200 years and both the left and the right have changed radically. The right has adopted many of the Enlightenment values while still including the old feudal, conservative, fundamentalist, backward-looking values. So there are two main groups on the right. The left has two factions also - there are still the rationalist, scientific, progressive types but also there are the greens who are pluralistic, holistic, sensitive and inclusive. So broadly speaking there are 4 different ideologies or world-views.

In our present situation an electoral system that lets several parties into parliament is vital. Otherwise, what you end up with is the situation like in the USA where the fundamentalist Republicans have fought and dominated the Enlightenment Republicans and now they have complete nutters running for president. Political debate has become horribly polarised and extreme. If the USA had separate parties then the fundamentalists would be in their own party free to do their own thing and wouldn't be able to colonise a major party.

Here in NZ if we go back to FPP (or switch to any of the other systems which are just FPP-lite) in NZ then the Greens will probably merge with Labour. ACT will merge with National. This would be to the detriment of everyone because then no world-view will ever be properly represented and parties have to deal with more internal strife. When one internal faction wins they will have the power to swing the country wildly in whatever direction they like, as we saw in the 80's.

Our electoral system (an external thing) needs to reflect the state of our values and world-views (an internal thing). So we need a system that enables more than two world-views to be represented. When external and internal are out of sync human development is severely hampered.