Feckless Hegemony
Current mood: animated
Category: News and Politics

That's my favorite new phrase - and I coined it.  I'm so cool some days.  Let me explain briefly from where it came.

[warning - this is one rare nakedly political piece you will see in this space]

Reading a bit in the news this week, I saw a piece on current Iranian views of the US.  The piece quoted a few individual Iranian citizens, specifically about the US presidential election. Normally I would blow this off since, well, THEY DON'T GET A VOTE.  But then it dawns on me, a single US election has more impact on a typical foreigner than it does a US resident!  That seems odd, but it's true.  There's very little reason to expect substantial domestic change.

What's being decided in this race?  To most people, it's a binary choice between two major party candidates.  And that's how it's been for most of democratic history.  It's just easier to run a campaign if you can polarize people and make it a mano-a-mano sporting affair.  That's far easier than stating and defending principles and leading people through the logical progressions to policy.

Note the history of the popular vote.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781450.html
More and more in modern elections, the major parties manage to keep the vote very close to 50/50.  This is surprising.  Should there not be swings in attitudes over time, populist ideas that take hold, or wax and wane through decades?  If the parties were consistent in what they represent, any ideological shift would flow through to the election results.  I submit that the major parties, if they know they have a hold on power, will always tune their message to appease, and fight each other to a near draw.

The scary thing to me is that nowadays the two party system actually *is* a system.  It's no longer a natural result of free political discourse, but in many ways it's codified in law, and backed up beyond even that by courts that espouse expediency or other super-legal rubrics.  For one thing, the material barriers to entry are set high at every level.  Independents and minor parties must mobilize substantial armies to get signatures to even appear on ballots.  Funding rules exclude parties that don't already have a substantial previous result. Election media laws practically exclude them from the tremendous free coverage given the big two. 

Then, even when they do everything right - the courts are ready to prop up the status quo.  In two States this year, the Libertarian party was kept off ballots for technical deficiencies.  But in Texas, both major parties made the same kind of mistakes, and were still allowed on ballots despite legal appeals from the Libertarians (who can scarcely afford a high powered legal team).

The major parties are not going away any time soon.  At this point we can at best hope to keep them honest and on-target.  For a quick way to cut though and see what those targets were supposed to be, I recommend you take the totally non-partisan quiz at,

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

I'll give you my scores on request.

[My own comment: Since the Republicans completely co-opted the traditional liberal agenda in 1994 and 2004, I have to ask - what are the people crying for "change" really asking for?  Real change at this point would be a shift to a limited government, based on strict principles of defending real freedoms, which is engaged in the larger world without being entangled in it.]

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