The two-party system has created the false illusion of choices, the idea that the two are so vastly different from one another and so far apart on the political spectrum. Yet the reality is that both Democrats and Republicans have given us mass deportations, useless wars, corporate bailouts, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, and the decline of our civil liberties. Both parties are funded by the same people: big pharma, big oil, and big banks.
Trump promised to drain the swamp. His cabinet serves as a direct counter-example to this. Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, at State; Steve Mnuchin, who worked for Goldman Sachs for 17, at Treasury; Wilbur Ross, a lifelong banker, at Commerce; Betsy DeVos, who sent all her kids to private school and has many conflicting interests, at Education; and the list goes on. Trump’s cabinet is the richest in U.S. history. He claims to have drained the swamp and vowed to continue to do so in his speech to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. Democrats audibly laughed at him. We have to hold this president to account, yet we must also hold the Democratic Party to account for creating this monster and putting us in this situation, and we must swear our allegiance to the truth, not to a party, and say that the Democrats have been doing the elite’s bidding for far too long as well.
The duopoly throws the average American a bone every once in a while. Many politicians from both parties pretend to care about us, but don’t. Some truly do care, but the system is rigged against them. My question is, in a country of 325 million people, are two parties truly enough to represent all of us? Most of you would say no. But we have to examine why this situation exists in the first place.
First of all, corporations buy politicians. They create the illusion of choice while really, the U.S. is a one-party system with two factions: Democrats and Republicans. Both parties do their bidding. They may differ on social policy, but in foreign policy, both have created bloody wars and mass refugee migrations, and both have bombed villages and funerals and clinics and weddings and killed thousands of civilians. Really, if you look at history, you’ll find that war is just the strategy the corporate world employs to get richer. The military-industrial complex continues to grow. Corporations control the Commission on Presidential Debates, locking out alternative choices.
Secondly, we have a winner-take-all system under the Electoral College. Now, if it were proportional in each state, we’d have a much fairer electoral system. What would be even better, though, would be a runoff procedure of two or three rounds, much like what is done in France, Austria, Finland, Turkey, etc. Also, the ballot access laws are oppressive and repressive in nature. The only reason we’re in this mess is because various states feared the rise of socialist and other left-wing parties in the early to mid-20th century.
Thirdly, the people still refuse to break free. If everyone who said, “I agree with the Green Party, or the Libertarian Party, or the Socialist Party, and I’d vote for them, but they have no chance,” actually voted for them as opposed to giving in to a Democrat or a Republican because they want to vote against the worst candidate as opposed to the best candidate, then we’d already have a third-party president and a multi-party Congress.
Remember, the Democrats created this mess. Time and time again, it has been demonstrated that the Democrats cannot be saved. Justice Democrats, a new initiative, will fail, just as the last initiatives and insurgent campaigns have. How do we get out of this cycle? We vote for what we believe in, not against what we fear the most. Look around, educate yourself, and follow your heart. Vote for what you believe in; rally behind a candidate you believe in. Most of the developed world has vibrant multi-party systems. I myself was born in Germany and lived there most of my life. The political culture and experience there and in neighboring countries is so different from the United States. What we have here is an illusion of choice between cyanide and arsenic. What they have in multi-party systems is mechanisms that allow various political entities to rise up, in proportion to how many people actually support them. Maybe not enough socialists exist in the U.S. to vote in a socialist president. But are there pluralities of socialists in certain counties or cities? Absolutely. Do Greens and Libertarians and others have the potential to win congressional elections? Of course they do.
So why aren’t they winning? You know the answer.
