The USA's two party system is deeply ill, afflicted with so many lesions and malignancies that it is not salvageable. The solution is to refuse to vote for either of the two parties. In the last presidential election, 45% said they were voting for the lesser of two evils. There are ways that people can express this at the ballot box. Many nations and municipalities allow instant run-off voting or variants that allow people to specify their first, second and third choices. It is obscene that in a three way race a winner can have less than 50% plus one vote.
The real solution is to support independent or third party candidates. We have Bernie Sanders and Angus King in the senate. We need 98 more independents. We need to en masse, end our registration as Democrats and Republicans and register as independents, or OTHER or in third party.
We need to get THIS conversation going all over the place so just the idea that a politician is a member of either party is a liability for a growing number of voters.
The Democratic party is no longer the party of the middle class. The Republican party never was. The 99% have to find a way to work together. Maybe the trick is to make a truce on some issues. I'm not going to list possible ones because that will get some or many squawking. But right now, we're all being screwed because we're segmented and divided over wedge issues. What if independents could promise to just leave certain issues alone-- not change them-- and in exchange, they could agree on some big items--
-get rid of too big to fail companies
-prosecute bankers and other corporate heads who break the law or engage in fraud
-Clean up elections so people with the most money don't have unequal influence
-make sure that every ballot cast can actually be re-counted-- and get rid of electronic voting
-don't allow elected officials or their family members to take jobs with corporations that they had the slightest connection with, or voted on legislation that affected them-- forever.
I believe it's possible to identify at least 50, probably more like 100 substantive issues that 60% or more of the population support. If we could take the top 10 and used them as the litmus test of independent candidates we just might start putting more and more independents in the Senate and the house.
If you look to Israel, something impossible in the US happened in the last election. Netanyahu failed to get the support he was expecting from the collection of coalitions in the Israeli "parliament." There, in Israel, there are many different parties and new ones come and go. This is what many newer nations have-- nations that no longer look to the US constitution as their inspirational model.
We need to move outside the box. We need to look for caterpillars. We won't find them in the ballot booth under the D or R.
The world is moving to become a much more bottom up kind of place. That means de-centralization, decrease or elimination of hierarchies and taking back of control from dominators at the central level. That is a wave towards the future that is unstoppable. The two party system, frozen and immobilized by old time, co-dependent deal-makers like Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell is a dying dinosaur. They will disappear. We must churn the inventiveness of our National culture to come up with what will become the butterfly-- the new model that makes the current one obsolete.
Things fall apart (a gesture of respect to the late Chinua Achebe) when new models emerge. That will be the price of freeing the butterfly-- and it will be a process of freeing, because I know and believe that that butterfly is there, within, us, full of potential, ready to lift us all-- when we simply take the steps and see the possibilities that are waiting to unfold.
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