Until this election, I'd never voted for a Republican for President. So I'm not much of a stalwart conservative, at least not at the ballot box.

Instead, I often supported outsiders like Nader and Perot.

My old narrative was that I felt neither party was very different from the other, and neither party really represented what America needed. They both stayed away from debating huge, important issues important to all of us, while debating the relatively minor (and often, I felt, insincere and pretended) differences between their positions.

For example, Republicans spoke like they were against big government, but often did as much to increase the scope and cost of government as any Democrat. (Bush is certainly no exception.) Both parties seemed reasonably coherant on national defense. While Republicans opposed abortion, in theory, very few of them, save, perhaps Reagan, did much about it. None really wanted to balance the budget or control immigration. None were really serious about fixing major problems with the legal system. Nor, I felt, campaign finance reform, which I supported at one time.

Some of these complaints are still true.

Yet I've stopped voting for outsiders. Why?

For one, the Democratic Party has shifted so they're no longer as close to Republicans as they used to be, whatever John Kerry may say in exactly half of his speeches.

The Democrats have turned into an anti-war party. Rather than follow Lieberman's moralistic lead, they've become overtly socially radical. Instead of defending Roe-v-Wade type abortion statutes (which allowed limitations or bans in the third trimester) they've moved to arguing the importance of allowing even partial-birth abortion, "aborting" a child whose body was now located mostly outside the mother. Instead of pretending to believe in "choice", they're now working to prohibit even "conscience clauses" by which doctors, students, or medical facilities who are morally opposed to abortion were not forced to perform it. Etc.

But there's another, more crucial reason:

When Perot entered the debates in '92, the situation was radically changed: The candidates were now obliged to discuss a number of topics they had been avoiding before. I saw how a threat of a third party breathed life into an unresponsive political system.

So I worked, a little bit anyway, to try to establish some third party, in an effort to "destablize" the effective political monopoly created by the Republicans and Democrats. I didn't care whether this new party leaned left or right, it mattered not to me. I just wanted to see more important issues debated, and see the power of the two-party system broken.

All that changed shortly after 2000.

There were several factors in this decision.

For one, I went into the 2000 election disliking both Gore and Bush, though I feared Gore more -- but only slightly. But when I saw the way Gore behaved in Florida, and saw the way the Democrats were, quite boldly, trying to change the vote by playing with the ballots until they could "find" the votes they needed, and trying to change the election laws mid-stream (and succeeding, thanks to the Florida Supreme Court, which sanctioned violation of the state laws), I began to see the Democratic party as a group of people who would do anything, including subvert the electoral process, to gain power.

The next thing that changed my mind were Bush's first months in office. I was impressed with the people he appointed. I was impressed -- and I'm ashamed ot admit this today, because this kind of thinking is racist -- that they were minorities -- moreso than even Clinton. And further, I was impressed that they were all competant, that he hadn't traded color-based preferences for core competancy, as Clinton clearly had in a number of cases.

I was also impressed with the way he seemed to be tackling the right problems, in the right way. And seemed to be working at reaching across the aisle -- working with Ted Kennedy, leaving about half of Clinton's appointees in place -- though later I would see him burned time after time for doing so.

This was not the corrupt, incompetant behavior I had expected from Governor Bush.

Then there was 9/11, in which I came to understand we had more important issues to bicker about than NAFTA and the deficit. Bad politics could get people killed.

I think I understood this -- at some level, anyway -- during the Clinton administration: I was ever-annoyed back then at Richard Clarke's obsession with "cyber-terrorism" (which struck me as way of removing civil liberties and making 12-year-old boys into "terrorists") rather than focusing on real-life flesh-and-blood-ripping terrorism. But 9/11 made me think perhaps I had erred by not supporting Bob Dole -- who might have had a better chance at doing the right thing about Osama bin Laden -- rather than Clinton, who clearly had nothing remotely resembling moral courage.

This made me rethink my 'strategic' voting patterns.

And finally, I had put science into play to think about a political problem.

When I was younger -- about 17 -- I had accidentally discovered the basic principles behind what was later called "chaos theory".

Just for the fun of it, I'd written some simulations of planetary motion. I discovered that systems with three similar-sized "planets" were unstable. One or another planet would often get kicked out into the great beyond, or fall into another planet.

I also discovered that, in such situations, when even the tiniest change happened in the numbers used to drive the program, the results of the simulation would come out completely differently. I'd start with one initial value and a given planet would get kicked out, going in one direction. I'd change that value by 1x10-19 (a tiny fraction) and I'd see a completely different result.

Later, I'd read Glueck's Chaos and saw these were the two basic principles behind chaos theory: Systems with three actors, or a repeating pattern in threes, were inherantly unstable. And in such systems, even tiny, tiny changes could be amplified to have huge differences in outcome.

Politically, it is the first principle which is relevant: Systems with three actors are unstable. Specificly, three-party systems are unstable. One political party will inevitably get kicked off into nothingness, or end up crashing into another, merging into one bigger party. Either way, you end up again in a two-party system.

I also noted a three-party system could sometimes create the worst possible result: Seeing the least desirable candidate elected to public office. Consider: If 60% of the population agrees on a given solution, but two candidates offer the same stance, that vote can be split 30%/30% between them, allowing the candidate offering the least desirable position -- with 40% support -- to gain office.

I wondered if something similar might have happened with Bill Clinton. Specifically, I wondered if Perot had cost Dole and/or Bush 41 the election. Considering that only about 30% percent of the population had voted, and that only 40% of those voted for Clinton (he was elected with the smallest "mandate" in presidential history) it looked like we might have a candidate who had been put into office by only about 12% of the population!

A similar, but much weaker argument might have been made for Nader in 2000. (Nader attracted only 3% of the vote; this was only a fraction of the effect Perot had.)

So, in the end, I realized that multiparty configurations would always devolve into two-party systems, and that when one party got stupid -- as the Republicans are doing right now about fiscal conservatism and immigration -- the other party could always switch positions and pick up support by adopting it -- as Hillary seems to be doing right now on immigration.

So I'm still not nuts about a two-party system, and don't pretend the last guy I voted for supported my views in every way (though he was better than his opponent). But I have come to understand trying to create a third party is not necessarily what we need to be doing right now.

Not that you asked. :-)