Quote:
Originally Posted by tshiggins
Yep. It's a problem -- but disciplined creation of electoral districts to make them as competitive as possible mitigates the issue, to a large extent. People get tired of losing, and the more extreme the views, the fewer people find it appealing, and the more people it alienates.
We have a name for an extremist who wins a primary, but loses a general election.
"Private citizen."
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This system/approach of 'eliminating the extremes' is not necessarily an inherently good thing, in fact it can have strong dark sides. An example would be modern RF, where the parliament became so monolithic in its elimination of fringe opinions that there was exactly
one deputate who voted against initiating territorial aggression, and was immediately branded a national-traitor for it. It's easy to say 'extremists are not fit to rule', it is much harder to avoid making it into a buzzword that is used as a justification for alienating whoever does not fit in with the establishment. And I'm pretty sure this phenomenon has plenty of other examples, such as the Cold War Witchhunts, or the voting of the Enabling Act, or the October Revolution etc.