Political Detour: The Two-Party System And You

That's right, kids, it's that time again. It's that special type of blog post where Matt looks at the country he's living in, and pukes in his mouth a little bit. You guessed it, it's another Political Detour...

So, everyone's all excited that the Republicans won every single one of the November elections. By "everyone", of course, I mean "not the Democrats". And by "won", of course, I mean "all the Republicans are acting like it's a done deal already even though a single vote has yet to be cast."

This is all smoke and mirrors. The Republican Party will get pretty much the same thing done as the Democrats did, which is to say, absolutely nothing aside from spending amounts of money we'll have to make up new numbers for. The GOP has no agenda as far as I can tell. They're more concerned with regaining power than they are with making the country a better place. Their main running points consist of pretending to be the victims of Democratic propaganda. They aren't proposing solutions, they're just making themselves out to be the innocent punching bag of the governmental bullies. Which simply isn't true. Like virtually every modern political campaign, it's all pathos, no logos.

This is what's wrong with the Two-Party system.

Politicians currently have more loyalty to their party than they do to the people they represent. This is because of money. The candidate wants to get elected, they need money, the easiest way to do that is to align with a party. Party equals money equals better campaign equals recognition equals votes. With only a few extremely rare exceptions, there is simply no other way to win elections. Because of this, the path to winning starts with the parties, not with the voters, and that's where the politicians's loyalties fall. This causes a bunch of empty amoral shells in Congress that simply vote for the party agenda.

This prevents any sort of independent or moral thinking in government, and keeps it pretty much constantly divided against itself. This is why nothing ever seems to get done in government, because politicians are unwilling to think for themselves, or their funding is cut and they lose their seat in the next election.

Now, let's say for a second that one of the parties had a legitimately positive and effective agenda. Of course this will never happen, but for the sake of argument, just go with it.

This agenda will never get through because of a combination of term lengths and party loyalty. The first year-and-a-half to two years after a new Senate is in place, nothing of substance happens because they are busy cleaning up the last Senate's mess, re-structuring committees and figuring out where to buy the best hookers. There's a third of the term gone. Then, there's another year that is spent debating hot issues and proposing bills. The next year is spent voting itself to a standstill and getting nothing out the door. By the time year five rolls around, they're all thinking about the next election, and nothing gets done for the next two years. This is a tremendous waste of time, and something in the system needs to be seriously re-structured to prevent it.

Of, course, six years is a long time. So, why does this happen?

It comes back to the party system. The politician's main concern is keeping their seat at all costs. Not helping people, not improving the country, not creating jobs. Keeping power is and always has been the number one priority. This is not going to change. What can change is how they go about keeping it.

The funding from political parties is what keeps politicians in power. So what would happen if there weren't parties? They would have to start voting how the people that elected them want. There would be no party agenda to enforce to ensure political backing, only the will of the voters. With parties in place, the politician has little choice but hit the campaign trails for a third of his term.

Want to know what the biggest roadblock for progress in this country is? It's not Obama. It's not Muslims. It's not redneck Tea Partiers. It's not the national debt. It's not unemployment.

It's Democrats.

It's Republicans.

It's political parties and the Two-Party System. It's broken, archaic, detrimental to us as a society, and needs to be thrown out.

The worst thing that could happen in November is for anyone to win.