If I had the power I think I would dissolve the two major parties in the United States. Of course I don’t have that power but maybe if enough of us went with the idea. What made me think this way was a comment by Nassim Taleb in Antifragile.
“What is plaguing us in the United States is not the two-party system, but being stuck with the same two parties. Parties don’t have organic built-in expiration dates.” p. 104, Emphasis in original.I am sure you have all heard the term “uniparty” that infers there is not real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. Obviously that is not true in the ideal sense. All you need to do is read the party platforms and listen to what they say they believe. The problem is not in the parties but in the people who are locked in because they have not had an original thought since the first time they were asked what kind of cake they wanted for their birthday.
You have met them I am sure. I recently heard about an elderly lady who was pro-life, anti CRT, believed homosexuality was a sin, opposed sex change operations for minors and so forth. In addition she claimed she was a Christian. She was going to vote for her local Democrat congresswoman. The politician made no attempt to hide that she was opposed to everything this lady believed in but the lady thought she was a nice person. And a Democrat.
We all know people like this. On the other side we have people claiming to be Republicans who don’t believe in anything that the party stands for. These are the voters, not the politicians.
Maybe we could have a system where you would go on line, enter your position of issues and be told who would be the best candidate. Of course that would involve computers and the internet so you would have the same problems we are having with voting machines now.
It might be enough to just have the politicians hide which party they were affiliated with. That would force people to look beyond labels and into issues. The main problem with that is it would require thinking. On the up side, if they were required to think then a lot of low information voters would not bother.
Call me a heretic, but I think that might be a good thing.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, Antifragile. New York: Random House, 2012.
homo unius libri
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.