Hm.
Got into an interesting series of conflicts last night over the implication that one or the other political party should disappear -- and which one it should be.
The CW that's trying to gel in the Lefty Blogosphere is that the Dems are so fundamentally corrupted and incompetent (viz: the Coakley-Brown Thing) that they should have their ticket punched for the last time and be sent packing, never to return. And Goat for Azazel-like, they will be our Sin Eaters and sent into the desert, there to... disappear.
Or the Dems should be shunned and ostracized and a Third Party formed by all the hot-headed Internet Progressives. Yeah. That'll work. G'head. Try it. How about putting Ezra in charge, since everybody loves him.
Oddly, the psycho party -- the Republican Party -- is left immune from all this puerile "one of the parties has got to go or I'm gonna form a Third Party" harrumphing.
When I point out that our electoral system only allows for two parties at a time, and third parties cannot, to a mathematical certainty, ever reach the point of significant power, it's generally understood that is the case, but there is much fussing over it. "Why can't a third party succeed?" It's the Math. The two established parties have priority of place (and more money than God, thanks to their Corporate sponsors -- the same corporations sponsoring both parties, how convenient) and an upstart third party, except under very extraordinary conditions, cannot reach a plurality sufficient to take the election before one of the established parties does. It's a built in feature of our winner-take-all electoral system.
Ok, runs the thinking, then one of the parties has to go away: "I know!" chimes the chorus: "The Democrats! Let's make the Democrats go away! I don't like them! They make me sick!"
How... intriguing.
So I point out that we have two wings or branches of a single Corporate Party to choose from right now, and the only viable choice a voter has when one of the Parties is unsatisfactory is the other party. One of the Parties, the Republican Party, is psychotic, demonstrably dangerous, bloodthirsty, rapacious, etc, etc. The other one, the Democrats, is their enabler. So you want the Democrats to go away?
Why not have the psychotic Republicans go away instead?
It's like a new and impossible thought for many people. The idea of disposing of the Dems once and for all is easy to grasp, it seems. They are so disappointing they deserve to expire. "At least with Republicans, you know what you're getting." OK... but they are psycho, certifiable, deeply dangerous.
Why keep them around?
"Well, you just can't 'exterminate' the Republicans! Anyway, there will always be bloodthirsty psychos in politics! It's the way things are!"
Jeebus.
In most civilized societies, bloodthirsty psycho political parties aren't even allowed to begin with. This has to do with something that happened a while back, which fewer and fewer are remembering, when some bloodthirsty psycho parties rose to power in Europe and Asia, primarily, but they have also done their dirty work elsewhere, and commenced to... erm... "misbehave" as is their nature. Leading to, oh I don't know, genocide, mayhem and World War among other things. Psycho parties are dangerous not just on the micro scale of countries, but globally.
We've had experience.
Thus, most civilized societies today ban psycho parties outright.
Yet our psycho Republican Party is constantly indulged, not just by Democrats but by practically everyone. Why?
Why would anyone think that if our current political conundrum calls for the creation of a New Party, in a two party system, the one party that should expire is the "enabling" party, not the "psychotic" party?
This makes no sense, none at all.
It's self evident (at least to me) that if the psychos were locked up and their party was eliminated, the enablers wouldn't have to... enable that psychosis any more and might be free (yay! freedom!) to be and do what they want to be, which is apparently to become the Good-Burgher Moderate/Conservative Technocrat/Manager Party. Of the Republic.
In other words, pretty much what Republicans were in the 1950s.
So my proposal is that we work to get rid of Republican-psychotics, let the Democrats be the Moderate/Conservative Party they really, really, really want to be, in other words, let them become the Right Wing of our political spectrum, the sole (and perhaps appropriate) Corporate Party, and let us build a New Party by coalescing the many leftish "third parties" (Greens, Progressive Labor, Socialists, etc.) into a single People's Party (of the Republic) and go from there.
Makes perfect sense to me. It's OUTRAGEOUS!!!!™ to some others, who insist that it's the Democrats who need to go away or be transformed, infiltrated, turned Left.
I say no. Let the Dems be the Corporate Party they really want to be, and get rid of the Rs. Legally. Build a new People's Party from the kernels already extant, that will operate well to the Left of the Democrats.
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