Has the administration made people too afraid to step outside of the box? To challenge the lines of conformity? Or is it really all about money? I proposed a question a short time ago asking why politicians need money in order to campaign. I think we need a level playing field where the rich minority doesn’t have control, barraging us with rumors and propaganda. We don’t need politicians with money, we need politicians with real experience who offer a plan… something different than has been done before, regardless of how fat their wallet is or how big of a party they can throw.
It will take a strong willed person with a tight circle and the genuine desire of the people to restructure our political goals. But I hope it wouldn’t also entail the destruction of our way of life as we know it.
There are several minor political parties, and the reasons none of them can compete nationally have nothing to do with the Obama administration. I can’t even fathom the logic there. The short answer is that the Republicans and Democrats run the show and have structured the political system to their advantage, and that while few people fit perfectly into one party or the other, on a national scale they represent average people’s opinions fairly well (and when an idea from outside the parties catches on, they’re able to co-opt it).
Maybe I should’ve worded it past and present administrations. Just an ‘in general’. Not an attack on any one administration in particular. Thanks for your input!
The two major parties have always been able to adapt to major movements. The Republicans were founded by people who were fed up with the Democratic and Whig positions on slavery, and the Democrats successfully incorporated the key points of the Populist and Progressive movements. These days the two parties are broad enough to handle a pretty wide spectrum of views under their basic platforms.
What’s left over is usually the people who think neither party is doing enough about Issue X (health care, government spending, the environment, you name it.) They tend to coalesce around a single issue and don’t appeal to the average voter’s galaxy of interests. Just look at the current budget debate. Government spending is out of control, taxes are too high, but one group of voters who feel this way don’t want cuts to programs like Social Security, while the other doesn’t want military spending to be reduced. Where does that leave the antitax movement?
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Do you have a source for this, btw? “on a national scale they represent average people’s opinions fairly well”
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You want a source that the two large national parties are big tent affairs made up of coalitions and factions? You don’t understand that ‘Democrats’ can range from left wing liberals or even socialists through moderates all the way to blue dog conservatives?? and the ‘Republicans’ run the gamut from religious conservatives, paleo-conservatives, NeoCons, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and ever a few moderates?
We have plenty of third party political entities in the US. However, our system is such that it’s a winner take all election. Our SYSTEM precludes third parties from being more than marginal fringe entities…basically, if a third party has enough of a following that it gets on the national radar then most likely one of the big two parties will incorporate some, most or all of their platform into their own. If it’s popular enough then both parties might take selective bits, so as to drain off the voters to their party.
What’s happened in the past is that when one of the two large parties started to become irrelevant, a third party with a large following and waiting in the wings can sort of swap itself into a position to become one of the big two. It would then put some or all of the former party under it’s tent and continue on. That’s how we got the Republican party…and the Democratic party for that matter. You don’t hear a lot about the Federalist Party or the Whigs anymore, after all.
I’ll think about where I could find a source for that, but it seems pretty obvious to me. If you talk to most people about politics, you’ll find their opinions are represented by a mix of Republican and Democratic positions on most issues. If an issue makes its way into the mainstream from outside the two parties and the politicians see an advantage in adopting it (like gay marriage or some of the current Republican positions on debt and finance), then one of the parties will co-opt it.
Too many third party figureheads are people that have never held a major political office. I’ve seen far too many of these amateurs try to run a campaign solely on popularity, without realizing that without an established political support base you just can’t proceed.
If you want to start a viable third party, start small. Organize your group, figure out your platform, then have your people run for nothing larger than city council or mayor. These are offices that can be won with just grassroots support for the most part. Once you’ve got office holders spread out through the country, you’ve got a large enough base to win a governorship or congressional office. Do not allow any of your party to run for president until you’ve got a large-enough group of higher office holders to support your potential candidate.
There is one. The tea baggers are living inside the Republican party right now, but they can not be controlled. Boehner can not get them to do anything. He seems very frustrated because the debt game he played, is out of control. I read that lots of CEOs and bankers have told him to get the ceiling passed. He can’t do it. The baggers will not move. The Repubs financed them but they are not acting like they are part of the party.
Lets say that , miracle of miracles, you get a third party candidate voted into the office of the Presidency. What is this person going to be able to accomplish with a congress and a senate full of Republicans and Democrats?
Assuming that these people don’t just happen to be all those who fail to vote currently, I would theorize that the hard left and the hard right would be stuck in their Democrat and Republican titles, the third party would probably be very centric. I’d also assume that quite a lot of legislating could actually get accomplished that very closely resembled what the ‘majority’ of Americans could live with.
Right now we talk about majorities being 51% (either Dem or Rep), both sides need to be able to push a mutually beneficial agenda. If it was centric in view, it could be done.
Currently on both sides of the aisle, there is too much background noise from the hard left and right factions of each party.
Define hard left and identify its members. I believe it is practically non existent nowadays or has no power at all. .All the battle is between right and far right, with the middle ground being slaughtered.
There is a right wing and a left wing in the US context, but definition. Just like you have a left half and a right half. Even if I sliced off 1/4 of your body on one side, you would still have a right side and a left side. Your center will just be to the right of what it used to be.
If the major parties in Utopia are Social Democrat, Socialist and Communist, the Socialists will be the centrist party. By US standards you might say they are all left wing, but that would be nonsensical in the context of Utopia.
Just as it would be nonsensical to say that both the Democrats and Republicans were right wing in 1911 because the maximum social welfare the Demorcats would support would be much less than what the Republicans would support now. Do you what we call people who think that people should work, beg or starve? Wingnuts. But that was a pretty mainstream view a hundred years ago.
If you want to complain that the center is to the right of where it was in 1971, then you have to listen to someone complain that it is way to the left of where it was in 1911.
The expecation that the political center will move inexorably to the left is not uiversally accepted.
The problem here is that the hard right habitually embraces a much, much broader definition of the “hard left” than is in any way realistic or defensible. They tend to view the whole left side of the field as through the wrong end of a telescope. Keynes and Stalin are the same. IME, the hard left does not reciprocate this error. Well, not nearly as often. Leftists (and not they alone) sometimes will say the Dems and the Pubs are really just the same, but that doesn’t mean they can’t tell Barack Obama from John Boehner from Ron Paul from Pat Buchanan from David Duke.
