General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA Two Party System.
I believe that a good Democratic system has to include two parties. But, since the GOP turned fascist Russian, I am hard pressed to pick a second, decent party. Can we survive if we only have one party? Am I wrong about this? I think two parties prevents one party from going power hungry nuts. But, who would that be? Who will replace Repubs in the Presidential debates, since they have no one capable of straight up political debate?
SmallFry
(349 posts)With a lot of support. If anything, a third party might gain slightly more traction.
Walleye
(30,996 posts)Doodley
(9,076 posts)What we have is a "duopoly", which is the crux of the problem.
When all our D.C. "representatives" have been pre-selected from, by, and for the wealthy classes, the vast majority really has little, if any, representation at all. All possible choices are constrained down to either/or selections between the lesser of two evils, and it all just gets worse and worse.
The House should have several thousand reps, and the Senate should be proportional to the population as well. Then we'd see more parties represented in Congress, and everyone would have to compromise more.
It will never happen.
Representative Democracy is dead. It never really worked anyway, as it was concocted in the era of whale oil lamps and horse-drawn carriages. It's been on "life support" since its inception.
We have the technology to create an actual, global, one-person-one-vote Direct Democracy right now, but the "owner" classes of the world are doing everything in their power to prevent that ever happening. They'd rather kill the planet and murder us all than allow that. Their price for their freedom is, apparently, universal servitude for the rest of us.
Pointless flags and pointless borders, designed to divide and conquer. That's all we've ever really had, sadly. Any astronaut can tell you that. But we all have to pretend patriotism toward our continuing mass delusions regarding turf and territory, blood and soil, profit and loss.
And with a shrinking few getting most of the profits, while the rest of us get the increasingly horrific losses.
But in reality, we've all come from migrants and refugees. Everyone "belongs" wherever they happen to be. We're all just traveling along on a great big spinning ball in space as "planetary citizens". That's the reality.
We could do something else with our political systems. We could. Perhaps we must?