Democracy and Divisiveness

Democracy and Divisiveness

Something I've been thinking a lot on lately and was happy to see an article about in this past weeks Economist is the gist of an article from the Washington Post sent to me this morning.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38244-2004Nov9.html?referrer=emailarticle

As both sides of the political spectrum in the US continue attempting to obtain their sacred 51% the middle is being left out of our politics.  Yet it does not have to be this way.  There are examples in American history when the middle became so fed up with the ends that political movements were formed to reconnect America's politics to its core.  Today we are in need of such a movement again.  I offer these historical examples as insight, not as models: http://www.us-civilwar.com/whig.htm or http://www.britannica.com/elections/micro/92/6.html

 What I'm thinking is an alternative to both the Democrats who I believe are too beholden to labor and Republicans who I believe are too beholden to corporate and religious interests.  A party based on fiscal conservatism, social liberalism, and international engagement diplomatically, militarily, politically and economically would be a welcome sight for me in today's political system.  No such party exists.  Through forming such a party our nation can extradite the extremes of our current state of politics to the fringes where they belong and return our governing institutions to the interests of all Americans, not just the labor liberal or religious-corporate right.

I feel my idea of the American political system is slipping away as pandering to either end drives the middle to retreat into an extreme themselves or be kicked out of the polity.  I don't know of any moderates left in the House, and there are fewer in the Senate after each election.  This scares me not so much because of the election of these sides, but rather how they treat our political system and our constitutional form of government once they are in office.  Attempts to write sections into laws that prevent judicial oversight is a fundamental breakdown of our checks and balances.  The introduction of religion into politics and thus appeals to what is considered a morally conservative America ignores the concept of minority rights and threatens those who do not share the majority's religious beliefs, whatever that may be.  Commentators on both sides strive to appeal to their base for sales of books, profits for cable news stations, and advertising revenue for newspapers.  Politicians feed into this dynamic by attempting to appeal to fifty-one percent of voters rather than the majority of Americans.  Redistricting across the country has led to the creation Congressional seats where over ninety-percent are party locked.  Election officials in almost every state are of one political party or the other, rather than independent.  The top executives of the companies that make the electronic voting machines which will count ninety percent of the next elections ballots are all large contributors to a single political party.  Simon and Schuster may be right that writing for the center is publishing suicide, but that is just what is needed in today's politics in order to return America to the center.   Then again, the American people, as sick as they are of the bickering, sniping, and personal attacks of the campaigns; thrive on such a schism, a view supported by the Post article sent to me.  To anyone out there who is a publisher I would like to request you consider working for the center.  It may not pay as well, but it could save America from the extremes.

When I wrote last week that I did not feel very American because of the results of the election that was an announcement of my surprise at the American people's willingness to feed into such as system rather overturn it with their vote.  I was not feeling lost or demoralized because my particular candidate did not win as much as I felt that America let me down in the face of this extremism from both ends.  I thought America would rise up and reject the Simon and Schuster’s the Michael Moore’s and Rush Limbaugh’s and the politics of hate.  Instead, America stood up and told me, along with many others who shared my faith in the American people, that these forms of politics are acceptable and preferable.  That is what disheartened me.  We did not have a justifiable third-party candidate campaigning for the kind of reforms I wish to see.  I think this left Americans with a stark choice on candidates and they went for what they knew rather than what they could not get a handle on.  On a fundamental level this is understandable.  On a policy level this was a tragedy for me.
There appears to be a threat to the constitutional system of government we inherited from our founding fathers.  At all levels our system is under attack from the right and the left.  Under such strain the center must rise to the challenge presented or else one of the two extremes will take hold of the whole.  Our system has built-in checks and balances to temper populism: the Electoral College, the three branches of government, the presidential veto, and Congressional power to override a presidential veto.  Unfortunately, each of these checks is under increasing strain as attempts are being made to weaken them one by one.  I do not blame that on any party in particular, but rather the willingness of the American people to put up with it from those who run our political process.
I would like to ask every American who is frustrated by all the talking heads on the 24-hour news stations, the aisles at the bookstores filled with books trashing one political side or the other, politicians undermining each other’s credibility by accusing each other of not being patriotic because of differing solutions to the same problems, untold amounts of money being used by political organizations to project distorted messages about contenders for office to the American people, politics of extremism on both sides that appeals to fringes of the political spectrum rather than the mass of America, gerrymandering that assures us a House of Representatives that runs to the extremes of politics, and voting machines across the country that do not offer a paper trail to check election results to join me in demanding an alternative.
It is not my delusion that an alternative party will replace either of the two main parties in our political system.  Instead, I believe we just need to show both sides that there is a core of America that doesn’t want to buy what those who run either of these parties are selling.  We did not have that chance in this election.  We need it in the next one!  Once the main parties realize that America actually abhors the political process they are encouraging those who run our two political parties will hopefully adopt the centrist positions of the new party and return to the center of politics, just as occurred in the past. 
Every so often the United States needs the center to rise and pull the political parties back from the edges.  We are at that point today.  Until we can achieve such a goal we will continue to witness the decline of the Democrats and the slide to the right by the Republicans.  Much of America is being left out of these two parties today.  Let us reclaim the center for America.