Sense of the World

This is an interesting article more for its ideas than necessarily its implementation. In short—and I just had this conversation with my dad yesterday—I think the 2 party system in America is completely broken.  And, I think it’s beginning to make things worse.

I sometimes feel like American is in a state of idealogical civil war, a civil war of philosophy. Every election cycle these days seems to be forcing the divide between the two sides (liberals and conservatives) to grow.  I attribute this mostly to the degradation of the actual campaign process and the increasing acceptance of tactics that were previously considered dishonorable.  There’s more mud-flinging, inaccurate accusations, faulty numbers, skewed opinions being put forward as true fact, and in general lots of disrespect and dishonesty.

If these things now define the electoral process in this country, howarewe supposed to find a “good” candidate?  How can we the people actually find someone who is honest and who will actually address the issues of the majority of Americans?

I don’t know about this Americans Elect thing…it sounds like just an interesting survey at this point.  It seems to me like if they really want to take strides toward legitimacy and actual worldly impact, they have to start challenging the entrenched two party system more directly.

Like many other things, I think the two party system is obsolete.  Are there two kinds of people in this country?  Not even close.  I wrote recently about how I feel bad for rational or sympathetic conservative thinkers who have conservative financial opinions yet agree with Democrats on social policies.  This is a perfect example of how the two party system no longer serves the country as a whole. You can no longer be “just” a Republican or a Democrat.  There’s no such thing; no one agrees with everything their party wants to do, yet they are forced to choose between only two candidates who are polar opposites of one another. Since the majority of people, statistically speaking, probably fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, what aretheyto do?

Americans Elects seems like a nice place to start to at least approach the idea of some sort of legitimate third-party candidate. But what’s it really going to do if no one actually votes for said candidate in the election?  Not a lot….let’s move this forward more quickly, please.