Why the two Party system is bullshit

American Political Parties are Broken

American Political Parties are scrambling to keep kowtowing to their base… their ever-shifting, ever-narrowing base. Where does that leave the rest of us? Out in the cold… or a galaxy far far away where it will take light years for the regular voices to be heard.

I was raised a republican. Now, I am neither a republican nor a democrat. I am an independent. Not one single candidate in either party sells me on their ability to actually run the USA as a civilized nation.

Maybe we used to be civilized, but we aren’t civilized anymore. We are more of a oligarchy or feudalistic system where what used to be a robust working class has become serfs, bowing and scraping just to get by. I have a science degree and I have been stagnant in my salary for years, and living in Florida, I get paid about 17% less than most other states.

We need more than a two party system. We need to break their  stagnant hold on American politics, but how on earth did we get here?

The republicans really aren’t republicans. The libertarians are old school republicans, but not really. The Democrats are leaning more and more to the middle with a quazi-socialist tenet (not that that is a bad thing necessarily) and the far left is kind of hanging out there with Pluto. The tea-party is mostly the last remnants of the old school bible belt south who tends towards religious doctrine as governance coated over with veiled and not so veiled bigotry with a healthy dose of not getting it.

The civility that USED to exist has left the USA in the wake of corporate greed and control. We have privatized institutions that should never HAVE been privatized thus creating a need for a continuous chattel-based society where people are the chattel. Permanent indentured servitude if you would prefer. Corporations and politicians see us as people to be owned, controlled, brow-beaten into submission to their whims and their money laundering machines. They know it behooves them to keep us downtrodden or defeated so they can reap the profit. They want us scared to lose our jobs, so we will do anything to keep them, even if it means giving up more and more of our pay, pensions, benefits, all the perks that many of our parents received as part and parcel of the job, so their profit margin can grow and the stock holders and owners can amass even more and more wealth. Fuck you, worker.

While the political debacle of partisan politics rages, we have destroyed the education system (No Child Left Behind Anyone?) and stopped teaching kids how to start thinking for themselves.

Then we sold everyone on the idea that everyone should and can go to college without giving them the tools to actually afford or succeed in college. I know, I was an academic adviser for a university. It was painful to watch, and nothing could really be done, but oh let them take out these loans at exorbitant interest rates, catch them coming and going forever.

And because so many students are applying, we can’t take them all in. Then because we under-educated them in high school, they can’t support themselves on any level because they don’t know how to do anything but take a test.

No worries, though. They can join the ranks of the permanent indentured corporate servitude until we ship those jobs overseas or to robots. Oh, and that plethora of college students who rack up exorbitant student loans that barely made it out of college? They’ll be flipping burgers along with the rest of them because we don’t have the jobs to support that many liberal arts, business, economy, etc. students. The vast majority still don’t know how to think for themselves nor do they understand how to vote.

The extreme religious right sees us as immoral slaves to be beaten down by a cross where we should be kneeling and scraping the ground in some blind obedience to something you can’t even touch. All the while, screaming tax-exemption and a war against them. They are the war lords waging war on the masses that refuse to believe in their brand of extremism and sharia law. That’s a not so lovely side of politics to look at, trust me.

All of this, plus standard progression in how people think and evolve has broken the two-party system. Some people point to a country like France where there is a multitude of parties and it can get messy. Maybe we need messy. Maybe we need to shake things up, let the nuts have some say so we can see their crazy agenda up front and personal instead of pulling puppet strings behind the scenes with millions of dollars. Maybe we need to turn the whole thing upside down.

When people like Donald Trump, who reminds me more of that drunk uncle at family dinners, who is narrow minded, bigoted and basically an asshole gets to be the front runner and people AGREE with his sentiment, that is a sign that the whole system is broken. It doesn’t matter if any part of what he says may have an ounce of credence or evidence to back it up. When you coat it in such awful, crass, people-bashing, it cannot be taken seriously, and yet here we are.

When the Supreme Court rules that corporations are people, we know who’s pulling the political purse strings, yet people are blind to it. They have become sheeple, blindly following the shepherd down into the slaughter house of eternal servitude and poverty, never understanding that the American Dream has been ripped away from them, right under their nose. The general American public has become the frog in the lab experiment. If the masses had been dropped directly into the mass of churning boiling political bullshit, they would have hopped right out. What has happened is that these degrees of self-inflicted harm via voting our rights away has slowly turned up the heat and we are cooking ourselves willingly in this boiling pot of political bullshit.

I refused to jump in. Maybe it’s time you jump out before you can’t.

We need to seriously revive classes like civics and government in high schools. I had both of these classes; my daughter did not, and I’m not sure I did all that great of a job trying to educate her on my own, but she looks up issues, studies them and then if she wants to she asks my thoughts. She votes and tries to make an informed vote. But not everyone does that.

We have taken the idea that these aren’t necessary classes to be taught in high school, but there is a growing majority of high school students who won’t ever see the inside of a government book, let alone geography or civics. Humanities? more doubtful. We have stripped away the ability for people to understand what they are voting for, how the government works and why it is necessary to vote, and I am beginning to think that is exactly what they want. “Oh, don’t worry about the details, would I lie to you? Just vote for me.” Scarily it works, more often than not.

So I say let the quazi-socialsist have their party. Let the Tea-party become a real party. Republicans and Democrats can re-brand themselves. Heck, lets have 8 parties, with 8 conventions and get the money out of politics. Let’s make the electoral college’s head spin. Hell, maybe that needs to go too.

But this two party system? It’s for the birds, and they don’t like the worm because it’s been in the Tequila of corrupt politics way to damned long.

J Daniel Valencia takes a very different approach to this. Read his article, “Why Two-Party Politics are NECESSARY. Does he have good solutions?

Please consider commenting on both posts and keep the discussion about two-party politics going.