To Which Party Do You Belong?

There are a couple of ways in which people make their ballot choices. In many cases, one will simply select the names that have their letter, a "D" or an "R" next to them. This type of voting lets the candidates off the hook with a significant portion of the voting population. The commonplace nature of this habit allows the candidate to cater to those that are "not" voting for his/her particular letter in order to collect more support.

The frustrating thing about this type of voting is the lack of accountability the voters hand over to the candidate. In reality, we as voters, are not simply "D" or "R". The alignment to a letter has become part of the construct of manipulation which propagates the corruption that we vocally despise.

The most simplistic descriptions of party alignment fall into the following realms:

D: Liberal
R: Conservative

However, this is an entirely misleading oversimplification. A "D" in one part of the country may have significant differences with a "D" in another part of the country. The same can be said for "R". To make matters even worse, there are a lot more letter that must be accounted for which usually fall under "I" (Independent: Libertarian, Green, Socialist, etc).

To break through the construct, we can see that the "smoke and mirrors" hiding the core problem do not account for the fact that we are generally falling into a couple more enlightening categories: Social and Economic.

Within those two categories, one will notice the labels of Liberal, Moderate, and Conservative. This yields 6 different core ideologies (each with an exponential number of sub ideologies) that must be rolled up into whichever letter they apply to their party choice.

1. Socially Liberal
2. Socially Moderate
3. Socially Conservative
4. Economically Liberal
5. Economically Moderate
6. Economically Conservative

Choosing a party to identify with does not necessarily accommodate the fact that not all members of a party are consistent with their level of slant to a particular side of the isle. There are cases where Democrats are more conservative than some Republicans and some Republicans are more liberal than some Democrats.

As far as the people at large go, Democrats are usually considered "for the people" and Republicans are considered "for big business". However, that is not an all encompassing description of our political reality.

An Oklahoma Democrat, for example, is considered significantly more Conservative than a California Republican. This leads to the point that I'm trying to make. There is not a simple Left to Right scale that determines if we are Democrat or Republican. There is a deeper scope depending upon what part the issue we're aligned with. This acknowledgment of the broader picture is the exact reason that the Two Party System is feeling the presence of additional parties. "We the people" are finding that when we're not appropriately represented, that an alternative exists.