“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.
We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.
“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”
Since the USA began, the country has indeed had several “new” political parties form and thrive. For another new party to form and thrive these days will take what it always did before: (1) an overall message more broadly appealing than whatever the candidates of the established parties have been saying, (2) able and trustworthy candidates running with the backing of the new party, and (3) enough capital resources and other support and expertise furnished by the new party’s believers in order for the new party’s candidates to purchase competitive amounts of effective political advertising in the available media. It has been done before; it can be done again.
The main problem with developing a third party is that those who would organize and support it, along the lines Friedman defines, are the working people in the country, who don’t have the time. They are busy working, taking care of children, and educating their children, and paying the heavier and heavier tax burden being placed on them by the political class. Furthermore, look at the Tea Party. It started out saying the things that Friedman says need to be said. But it has been savaged so badly by the MSM and by the liberal Democrats, and now by some of the idiosycratic nominees it has selected (see DE, KY, and NV) that it is a perfect example of how third parties rise and fall. I think a better way (but admittedly slower way) is to vote for and write letters and send emails for moderation and collaboration and raise those issues at town hall meetings. Tell our Congress persons to either work with the other side, or they’re gone. That may sound naive and pie in the sky, but if a large majority of the electorate did that, it would make a difference.
But the thing we can do, if we want to make the biggest change in the way we are going, is to de-welfare this country, like England is attempting to do. As long as their is massive dependency on the government, there will never be collaboration between the parties, because one side are takers and the other are givers (forced or otherwise), and sooner, rather than later, each side resents the other side – class warfare never works and that is what is being pushed in the political sphere right now, especially from liberal side.