Originally posted on
December 15, 2016; edited and updated for today
There was talk during the November election that the
Republican Party was splitting apart. That talk died down as soon as the
candidate they loved to hate unexpectedly won them the White House, but the
concern still has merit. Current debate over House and Senate versions of the
Republican health care bill shows that deep divisions still exist within the
party.
It also shows the ever-widening partisan divide between
Republicans and Democrats which threatens to obstruct any attempt to legislate
for the good of the people. The answer, in my opinion, is not to abolish the
party system, per se, but to expand it to five, six, eight, 10 parties – whatever
it takes to represent the diverse interests of 21st century Americans and
actually govern the United States.
As I wrote back in December, if you look closely at the
Republicans there are actually three parties – the Establishment GOP, the Tea
Party Obstructionists and the anti-establishment Trumpeteers.
The Democrats, meanwhile, had a hard time deciding whether
they were Clintonian Centrists or Bernie Sanders Socialists, so they settled on
dragging Hillary Clinton too far to her left, where she seemed to be
uncomfortable. It clearly didn’t work out for them this time.
Then there were the Libertarians and the Green Party, so
that if each was considered separately, you’d have at least seven distinct
political parties with their own identities, goals, values, platforms and
agendas. The Constitution doesn’t establish Republicans and Democrats as our
exclusive political parties, so we just have to agree as citizens to make this
change. Organize a party and nominate candidates. That’s all it would take.
That, and eliminating the Electoral College.
I’m an Independent who doesn’t identify with either the
Republicans or the Democrats, so I’d be totally in favor of this. I could vote
based on issues important to me and since there would be no Electoral College,
my vote would actually count.
Imagine if all seven parties nominated candidates in future
elections. You’d hold an election and count the ballots and the candidate with
the most popular votes would win. Period. In this past election, for example,
the seven candidates might well have been Jeb Bush, Establishment GOP; Ted
Cruz, Tea Party; Donald Trump, Trumpeteers; Bernie Sanders, Liberal-Socialist
Democrats; Hillary Clinton, Centrist Party; Gary Johnson, Libertarians; and
Jill Stein, Greens.
I don’t know who would have been elected out of that group,
but voting for Jill Stein would not necessarily have hurt only Clinton while
benefitting only Trump. Bush and Cruz would have given Republicans someone
other than Trump to vote for, cutting into his total. Bernie Sanders would have
stayed in the race against the other six and might very well have been the
president right now. We’ll never know.
If all seven parties also sent representatives to Congress,
every American could potentially be represented by somebody who shared his or
her political philosophy, and the two parties we have now that don’t play well
together probably would lack the votes by themselves to obstruct legislation,
shut down the government or create the gridlock that has plagued our country for
years.
Think about it. In such a coalition Congress, it would
become less important which party the president represented, because he or she
would have to work with a legislature comprised of seven or more sets of
representatives. It would force the parties to cooperate, form alliances that
might change from issue to issue, compromise on big-ticket legislation and
actually get things done for the country instead of the party.
The Centrist Democrats, for example, might align with the
Establishment Republicans to promote an infrastructure maintenance program but
split on the issue of universal health care, which would be more attractive to
the Greens and Socialists. Tea Party Republicans supporting smaller government
would find common ground with the Libertarians, and on and on, issue by issue.
It's possible, even probable, that no one party would be able to shut down the
government or obstruct all legislation the way the Republicans did to President
Obama for his last six years.
The way I see it, it’s time to get this (multiple) party
started. I mean right now, today. We just came through the worst election in
the history of this country, and the level of vitriol in our current Congress
has never risen higher, so there’s no better time to make a change than right
now...before it's too late
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