Did you ever play a game of snooker against yourself? Put up the other side of a ping pong table to practice? It didn’t take long until video game creators realized they made more money in a bar with a PacMan with opposing controllers. Let’s face it, playing by yourself isn’t as much fun or as satisfying. That’s why we had the post-war population explosion.
We are wired for opposition, for partnership, for the push and pull of another person across the table. It’s more rewarding together than alone — after all, taking a shower together was always nicer than showering alone.
But enough of beer bars and bedrooms. Off to where the real back-stabbing and dirty stuff happens — politics and government.
In my opinion, the evil creating the havoc we live with today can be traced directly to what we call the two-party system. Anyone who wants a career in politics has to align themselves with a party. They have to declare that they are either Liberal — Blue, or Conservative — Red. They can’t walk in and say, hey, look at me. This is what I can do for you. And the reason is twofold: money and the checkbox.
Campaigns cost money, and an independent candidate has to compete against the Superpacs. This isn’t a small thing. Since I am registered Republican, this is the only example I can give honestly — but I am positive it is equally true for Blue. I receive at least fifty give-me-money emails a day from Trump, Vance, Trump’s kids, and would probably get them from Trump’s dog if he had one. Those contributions flow into what we call a Superpac. So when a party endorses your opponent, your opponent suddenly has a war chest you can’t match, financed by people who have never heard your name and wouldn’t care if they had. If you run independent, you finance from your own pocket or whatever limited funds you can scratch together from limited supporters. A very uneven battlefield.
The second problem is who they serve once elected. They no longer can support the people who voted for them — they must support the people who paid for their election. They must vote along party lines. We see that now, every day. It has a name: partisan. Which is a polite word for captured.
Let me ask you a few questions. If we didn’t have the two-party system, would Donald Trump have been elected? If he had been elected, would those — sorry, you didn’t see the three-minute pause while I searched for words other than idiots, thieves, and suckups — cabinet secretaries ever have been confirmed? Would we be in Trump’s war of choice? Would Trump have been Article 25’d by now?
I’ll let you answer those yourself.
The two-party system isn’t in the Constitution. It isn’t carved in stone or handed down from the founders. It’s a habit. An expensive, entrenched, self-serving habit that benefits exactly two groups of people — the two parties — and leaves the rest of us standing outside the dance hall listening to music we didn’t choose and paying the cover charge anyway. Habits can be broken. Systems can be redesigned. The question isn’t whether we can do better. The question is whether enough of us get angry enough, soon enough, to demand it.
