Does voting doubt grow as political polarity shrinks? [View all]

[HereSince1628]

Party loyalty notwithstanding, the political landscape isn't your grandparents or your parents, and many of us are grandparents and parents. We feel strangers in a strange land.

The party whose fight for social issues made it the populist people's party, isn't populist anymore. It's become the party that pragmatically serves politicians and the elite who fund them

Democratic leadership has undergone a shift in basic economic philosophy...away from a model that sees production as a result of capital AND labor to a model that sees capital as the creator.

Who needs labor, who needs progressive ideas with populist support when you have to have money?

In this system, the value of social goods to help the people who labor must be sought through corporations rather than government agencies. Governments shrink from being employers, government shrinks from supporting education, governments shrinks from supporting infrastructure, governments shun pension and health care responsibilities. We have democratic leadership that actively searches to give government the capacity to out-source its obligations.

The republican party, for most of a century the party of stately and responsibly doing the business of business, is being driven towards the do-nothingness of federal anarchism promoted by free-reign libertarianism and religious fundamentalism. That party once led by elite thinkers is forced to respond to the populist appeals of a selfish, xenophobic 5th column that wants only to lynch the Federal government.

Regardless of campaign rhetoric, the service we get from our political purchases turns out not to serve us as consumers but the coffers of the masters of the political market place. It's system dominated by a single operating system. So we argue over choices based not on the merit of underlying philosophy as progressive or not, or good or bad, but rather as being situated somewhere on an axis that has evil and less evil as it's endpoints. How in the end can good come from such pragmatism? Wouldn't we expect smart people to notice?

It's a system we can and do recognize from organized gambling: the house NEVER loses.

Shouldn't that grow our doubt in the capacity of the system to serve us? Wouldn't such doubt leave some folks questioning about whether it's time to think about our acceptance of political realignments chosen by pragmatic elites who don't share or serve our values?