1
1
First, it's worth asking who these third parties would be. They could be anybody, and they might be everybody (that is, there would surely be a number of them). But the sad truth in the US is that the serious alternative political energy in this country is generally either on the nutty-scary extreme right, or the libertarian right. In addition to the fact that a certain party led by a certain fellow named Hitler once rose to power via precisely these means in a certain country which then had similar regressive political tendencies, I think we can say with some assurance that a multiparty system in America is only going to tug the country's politics even further to the right. Much as it pains me to say it, if we did engineer a multiparty system, many progressives could wind up after, say, Social Security and Medicare were chucked overboard in the name of small government pining for the good old days of the two-party monopoly.
The Nazi analogy also reminds of a second liability of multiparty systems, which is that they tend to be less stable. In moderate doses, that's usually not a hugely bad thing. But in more severe cases, especially during times of duress (like, well, now), it can be catastrophic. Another reason that the Nazis came to power is because voters got sick of a Weimar Republic where governments hardly lasted five minutes at a pop. That's bad enough ordinarily, but when the economic wheels are coming off the wagon, as they were then, the situation is enormously ripe for someone to come along promising to make the trains run on time. Sound like a familiar scenario? Again, for every bit as abysmal as Bush and Cheney were, we need to think carefully about what we wish for. History is quite emphatic in reminding us that it can get a lot, lot worse than that.
The third problem with reform of the party structure is that it is like term limits and sundry constitutional amendment proposals at some level just another attempt to avoid a serious reckoning with the hard work of seriously governing and being governed. Like I said, I'd like to see American voters have more choice in elections, especially because what they now have is just about zero. But I suspect for most people this electoral system reform project represents a quintessentially American quick-fix panacea to make the big ugly problem of not being able to have everything all at once just go away. And, therefore, people will only be disappointed to find that the problem doesn't go away. It might even get worse. And, worst of all, the notion of multiparty democracy could even get discredited by association, just as it in the Weimar case, or post-Soviet Russia.
The hard but profoundly simple truth is that Americans can't have giant tax cuts, substantial entitlement programs and a ridiculously bloated military all it once. It's called math, and it's just about as simple as a little basic addition and subtraction. (The alternative choice, by the way, goes by the name of voodoo economics.) But recognizing that and making the (seemingly) difficult choices involved is less appealing than searching for a magic bullet that can be achieved by showing up for a vote in a referendum. Then we can all go home, pop open a beer, watch the ball game and allow the government to take care of business for us.
Sorry, but that's a world that never was and never will be. And, indeed, never should be either. The real problem with American society is that we're supremely greedy, stupid and lazy when it comes to our politics and government. Most of us invest next to nothing in thinking about issues and voting intelligently, let alone other more robust forms of political participation. Heck, nearly half of us can't be bothered to show up and vote every four years.
There's no mystery here. People that disengaged are going to get precisely what they deserve when it comes to their government. It's like if you were raising your kids by popping your head into their lives once or twice a decade to check in, and then you're startled to find out that they've grown up to be disastrous little delinquents. What a surprise, eh?
The weirdest thing about our times is that the solution to so many of our problems are really astonishingly manifest, and would often involve little real sacrifice. America had actually found its way to many of those solutions during its mild experiment with progressive politics in the middle of the twentieth century, learning from the meltdown of regressive Hooverism which preceded it, and would have found more had it taken the right lessons from the subsequent Vietnam disaster. Unfortunately, we've essentially unlearned the former and never did get the latter.
But its really not that hard to get out from under the Atlas-sized burden we've piled on our own shoulders, if we wanted to. To wit, if we simply dramatically scaled down military spending and dramatically increased investment on alternative energy research and development, we could make a huge dent in our indebtedness, environmental, unemployment and foreign policy problems in one fell swoop, and with little cost in terms of dreaded change for most Americans. Few of us would have to give up the big flat-screen TVs or the reclining chair. We could still engorge our way into obesity and diabetes if we wanted to, and occasionally invade some little country full of brown people whenever our insecurities flared up to especially high levels. And yet we could still radically improve our lot in the meantime, with just these easy steps.
For the meanwhile, though, voters in the UK have given us a paradigmatic sampling of our political times. They don't know where to turn. They vaguely remember that letting the right have the keys to government is a prescription for disaster, but the so-called left has not only lost its nerve and purpose, it's lost its leftiness too. Hence an electorate all over the map in this week's election, and a hung parliament. Look for more of the same in America this November and again in 2010.
The great irony is that solutions are so close by. It's as if one crawled across the desert for ten days, only to die of thirst a hundred yards from an oasis.
Well, maybe that metaphor gives us too much credit.
Maybe it's more like dying of thirst sitting on your couch, because you got too lazy even to traipse over to the fridge to grab a Coors.
1 | 2
