Third Party & Independents: Archives

There comes a time when the effectiveness of an insignificant overall percentage of the results has to hit home and make your actions seem futile. We live in a two party system and let’s make the most of it by changing the rules by which we play. If all of the fringe party systems work together with a pluralist mentality then we can, in the short-run, show some effectiveness and turn this train around. I mean setting aside our political titles long enough to have an impact on the system in a symbolic gesture towards change for the future.

By temporarily joining the Republican Party, en masse, we can choose the Primary candidate for the Presidential elections of that party. After the respective conventions, when the entrenched parties choose a patchwork leader to follow towards the 2004 elections, we can go back to our respective parties and vote in the same old meaningless way, with our hearts, but with a sense of accomplishment for the time being. What I propose is creating, through collusion between parties, a parliamentarian approach towards our two-party system.

I disagree that people don’t care. Most people may not care enough to become politically active, but they are the kinds of people who will watch the news or even read an occasional newspaper. However, this public I have in mind will not seek out alternative viewpoints…and that’s a problem now-a-days because if you don’t actively seek it out, you may not hear it at all. I think it comes back to the Democratic (and even Green) Party, and their lack of leadership ability. They are not able to be charismatic and aggressive in order to give the people someone (or something) to rally around. This leads to people listening to the normal media sources, and only hearing one viewpoint. Democrats need to be more vocal, and the public needs to not be as lazy.

I also don’t think it’s smart of the Democrats (or Republicans) to cat-fight on issues. That only serves to strengthen the support of those that already held those beliefs. Fighting with facts is much more powerful. And yes, you will still get people that don’t learn, but I don’t think we can group the entire public into that category.

I think people care when they can’t pay for food or gas or medicine, or find a good job, or when there is a threat to their or their sons and daughters’ livelihood. But they don’t feel the need to micromanage the government for two different reasons:

(1) Most people don’t think it’s their job, they elect officials who are supposed to be handling this stuff. People pass on their responsibility as active citizens to the people around them who look like their being active enough to keep the democracy going, and look like their acting for a righteous cause. For this reason you hear very little from the middle-man in America, the average joe who we (you included) call stupid. Instead, we here from radicals on either end who tug and pull and, sure, that’s democracy and usually it leads to a consensus that’s good for the middle man, but it would be much easier if the middle man were involved to begin with. But, it isn’t human nature to be active until threatened, and to wake up these sleepy average joes they need to be imminently threatened, and only when this happens do they wake up. And usually, they aren’t, usually there is a fair enough balance to content them, so usually it is fine without them, but never as good as it would be with them.

(2) People feel they can’t change government: its all big money and big wigs, so why try.

But, yes, in general, there is a lack of people who know the basics of this country.

Not everybody knows what happened in the last coupla presidencies, not everyone knows what happened 200+ years ago, and not every knows that stuff is currently happening elsewhere other than just in football stadiums. There should be general education on this and general knowledge of this, but there isn’t, schools aren’t doing their job to either us these things or hold our interest in these things through life, when knowing what your president is doing and the basics of why and how are really vitally important.

People tend to only get concerned when the issues are at their front doors, and only then do we act. The people who look ahead are all too rarely balanced in their assessment of what exactly might be coming to the front door, or they try and use their foresight to their own ends, which—even well intentioned—isn’t the best way to have the system work.

Sorry for being wordy, but this is an important issue and people need to stop looking down on people who don?t seem interested, because that is what doesn’t help—you make politics elitist and turn them off: Instead of saying, “Hey, this affects you,” you badger with “Hey, this affected you, where the hell were ya?” And I don’t just mean you—or even mean you—but in general, this is the attitude.

One of the reasons I think Bush is so popular right now is that he gets people interested, even if he isn’t right or telling the whole side of things, he is speaking in a fairly common language which, at very least, makes people think they know what he is doing. And this is comforting to people, Bush does no policy talks with opaque language and spaghetti logic, he alludes to the fact that these things have been discussed, then goes on to inform us the basic conclusion of the policy talks. He makes most people know that they understand what he is saying. Unfortunately, thinking you know what you know isn’t always, as we know, the same as knowing what you know.