The Two-Party System Is Obsolete

Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia

Tonight (9/12) CNN is televising the Tea Party Republican Debate.  Think about that for a second.  The Tea Party is having a Republican Party debate.  Tea Party members claim that they are a conservative-libertarian group.  The Republican Party is or was a center-right (conservative) group.  One could argue that Tea Party members are the far (to extreme) right wing of the Republican party.  No matter what you think about them, they are a force to contend with in American politics.  Their rise to power is yet another example of the futility that is the two-party system.

Where does the libertarian shift of the Republican party leave members who are centrist in nature?  If the recent theatrics in Congress have shown us anything, compromise is not an option to be considered by many Tea Party supporting members. Republican members who have not signed on to the Tea Party platform have been left without a voice.  More and more Republicans have been told to "shit or get off the pot."  Centrists have been successfully "primaried" by Tea Party candidates.  The U.S. House of Representatives looks like it will continue to be dominated by conservatives after next year's elections.

The Democratic Party is even more splintered than their counterparts.  The Democrats have become infamous for their circular firing squads.  New England and California (with the exception of New Hampshire) are the liberal epicenter of the party.  The South, with the few Democrats that it still has, is the conservative base of the party.  Democrats from other parts of the country usually fall in the middle.  That adds up to a single party with many diverging political and social views.  The Republicans, even before the Tea Party, have appeared to have solidarity, while the Democrats have squabbled with each other.

In the end, voters are the ones are who end up having to choose between, what South Park so eloquently phrased, "a giant douche and a turd sandwich." We are usually left with choosing between the lesser of two evils.  Just look at the field of Republican candidates this year.  There may be two or three viable candidates, but voters will only be able to vote for one of them during the primary and general elections.  The Solution?  Create more viable political parties.  The Republicans could easily branch of into two or three new parties.  The Democrats could branch into three, four, or even five parties.  The Result?  Voters having more choices in general elections. Many good candidates have lost in the primaries, never to be heard from again.  The two-party system is just too vague and incomplete for today's diverse society.  Many other countries have multiple-party systems, each with varying degrees of success.

One major obstacle is obtaining a majority in the House and in the Senate with a multi-party system.  You need not look any further than our allies in England.  When no English political party wins a majority of seats in parliament, parties ally themselves with other parties to form a majority.  This is what happened after general election of 2010.  In a weird twist, the Conservatives (who won the most amount of seats), led by David Cameron, allied with the Liberal Democrats to form a majority government.  Thus, David Cameron is now Prime Minister.  Our system is somewhat different than England's, what with them having a Monarch, a Prime Minister, bad food, etc.  However, the idea can be used in Congress to form majorities.  It may occasionally result in gridlock (shocking, I know), but could it be any worse than what we have now?