The Two Party Fallacy

Democrat v. Republican

We're currently caught up in debate about how the two party system should not be scrapped. There is a growing annoyance with the number of Democrats and Republicans that are registering Independent. Libertarian, Green, and Constitution are the largest of the "Third Parties" at the moment.

In order to understand this growth, one must admit what the Democrats and Republicans are not ready to admit. Neither member of this Two Party System represent the people anymore. We are now able to assimilate significantly more information than ever before in the history of politics. We're kept up to date via multiple news sources of varying slant. We have breaking alerts, aggregates, tweets, blogs, etc. The news is not so easily controlled as when there were concise media groups delivering via a few newspapers fed through singular wire media and a couple of broadcast news channels.

As such, people are exposed to a lot more of what goes on in each party. The Democrats are no longer the people fighting to keep slavery alive. The Republicans are no longer the party that issues the Emancipation proclamation that ended slavery. Both parties are exposed as working for special interest dollars that determine their agenda.

Republicans will try to placate the masses by talking about requiring drug testing to receive welfare. However, they will not honestly try to institute something that will send kids to bed hungry because their parents smoked a joint and lost their food stamps.

Democrats will try to placate the masses by promising free health care. However, they will not institute it because their plan is not scalable or designed to work. It is designed to expand government, fail at offering health care, but give a black eye to the Republicans that are obviously the blame in it's failure.

In short, we've reached a level of information and technology that allows each individual citizen to see where each party does or does not line up with their way of thinking. This is allowing us to realize that if we pick one issues out of 100 important issues, we can align with a party. However, if we take all of the issues into account, suddenly neither party has a consistent stand on what we view as right.

At this point, we're unable to follow the sophomoric oversimplification that Democrats help people and Republicans help corporations. While Democrats offer a lot to the people in the form of entitlements, they also make sure they get rich in the process. Republicans have a lot of shady back end deals on their resume, but also keep companies that employ hundreds of thousands of Americans from taking their business overseas.

The fact that both Democrats and Republicans are ultimately working for the good of their party at the expense of the people has provided momentum for these Independent parties. Ultimately, we cannot have 300 million separate parties. However, Independent provides an outlet for those that are vocally ready to leave the partisan mess behind.

Unfortunately, the system is somewhat designed to protect itself. Ross Perot was the most viable Independent candidate we've seen. However, the nature of the Two Party system prevented him from getting the votes and resulted in a split vote which gave the victory to Clinton. What would the result have been if people were able to vote a run off? What would the results have been if he had not run? Pundits have suggested that Perot, one on one, would have beat Clinton or Bush easily.

Should Democrats and Republicans be afraid that people, exposed to information, are able to see the truth and turn away from the party that has turned away from them? Should the people "waste their vote" on an Independent candidate when they can more comfortably "waste their vote" on a candidate that they already know is corrupt and untrustworthy?

While I'm not sure that a Third Party can be viable in current elections, it would seem that the tide is turning. The old way of using a D or an R to indoctrinate your belief system could be coming to an end. The old way of using a D or an R to marginalize the true will of the people should be coming to an end.