Thank you, Zach, for sharing your personal opinion. You are providing a variety of views, which I appreciate, but none of them addresses the actual issue of many voters remaining unrepresented here.
But it also looks like you did not read the entire article. We should not have twenty little parties. We both agree there. As an example for us, Germany is a nation with a handful of parties. They have a limitation in place, but they do not have two political bulwarks only.
If we were to ask which nation is ruled more by the mob, the United States or Germany, and we had to pick one of these two, then the majority of people in both nations would probably pick one and the same nation. I hope we both agree that Germany has much cleaner politics than we do.
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“Mob rule” is spin.
We heard it all our life. The Framers already used it.
I am sorry to call this out on you. This is spin and it is sad that so many people repeat it (the two parties love it of course).
The sad part: our system has only two true colors, and a lot of spin.
Germany has a handful of colors. Spin is punished by the German voters because they have a choice to choose from and we do not.
If you are a Republican and your candidate lies, are you going to vote for a Democrat? Probably not.
But if you had more choice, you’d pick someone more righteous.
In this image, do you recognize that the US is to the left and Germany is to the right in light of politics?
It only takes three colors to make that image as colorful as the image to the right.
Do you recognize how we spin a green truth?
We spin it until it becomes either red or blue.
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Your solution about non-party affiliation is exactly what the Two Machines ended up doing for the local level. Nobody runs on a party line for cities or counties. And that is done for a very good reason (is what the two parties tell us and too many of us repeat).
Look at our nation.
Almost all the seats of our local councils and boards are occupied by members of a single party. They don’t declare their party affiliation, but the Machines sure are in full control. The local councils are either all red or they are all blue. But they are silent about that. How polite of them.
The Machines do not want you to associate your local representative with the State or Federal level of politics. That is handy — for them.
Okay, you may be that lucky one that lives in a spot where there happens to be representatives of both parties, but you are then really one of the lucky ones. Locally, this is in general a one-party nation.
Your solution to make things more invisible is not going to help us, because, behind the wall of invisibility, the powers (and the mob along with these powers) do keep playing the game. They won’t relent.
You can’t expose the Wizard of Oz by adding another curtain.
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Our politicians are not doing a good job. Yes, there are fantastic exceptions. But so many of us are tired with this 18th century baloney of just red and just blue. So many voters are truly not represented, and the mob has moved into our political institutions a long time ago.
Voters in proportional nations have more control over their politicians than we do. Our governments are farther removed from us than governments in nations with proportional voting (a good system for small nations and for our local level) or the mixture of district and proportional voting (like Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and this would be good for our State governments).
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I like your opinion, Zach, but allow me to say that it contains a repeat of how we were educated to think. Please investigate your own political power.
Imagine, for instance, an issue important to you that neither party is addressing. I am sure you can come up with a number of examples (we all can).
Now look at Germany with your issues in mind. Are they addressed over there? How are they addressed?
We all know that the United States has several hanging chads that just drag on and drag on; many other nations fully addressed them already.
That’s not spin.
Spin is explaining why it is better here. Spin helps make us look away from the essence of the issues.
Thank you again, Zach, I appreciate your comment.
