Two-Party Duopoly

What are the implications of a two-party system on democracy in the United States?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/What-are-the-implications-of-a-two-party-system-on-democracy-in-the-United-States-1”

Well, that’s simple… Gridlock.

You’ve been watching it in action for a couple of decades now.

Whatever one party initiates, the other dismantles.

The fine arts of negotiation and compromise no longer exist because one party views that as submission while the other regards that zero-sum game attitude toward cooperation as toxic and prone to counterproductive and even destructive initiatives that create problems without solving any.

For example, there is no rational justification for abortion restrictions. The entire issue is a non-issue stoked up to an irrationally unhinged fervour based on two misanthropic lies, that abortions are a lazy excuse for birth control by whores, and that they are acts of murdering babies. Neither perception resembles anything remotely true or anywhere near accurate renditions of reality.

They are lies stoked for the simple reason of creating political alignments on the vector of hating one’s fellow citizens. Since about 80% of the population is against abortion legislation, it’s been hijacked by the tyranny of a minority and leveraged as a power grab for a political party. The overblown abortion issue is a political wedge and a fundamental betrayal of a democratic system. This would not be possible in a multiparty system.

A two-party system is a recipe for conflict. In contrast, multiparty systems have been denigrated as being incapable of progress. The reality is that multiparty systems encourage negotiation and compromise among varying ideologies that more accurately reflect the expressions of individual beliefs than the aggregated pools of power occurring within a duopoly.

Another major disadvantage of a two-party system is that it limits the spread of investments the ownership class requires while choosing campaigns to finance. It’s a win-win system for them because it’s the cheapest way to hedge their bets. They can’t afford to spread their campaign investments to many parties in a multiparty system. So, their influence in politics is significantly diluted, and the will of the people is much more accurately represented by the diversity of ideological voices in Congress.

A further, much more subtle, and arguably the most profound impact on society is the homogenization of public thinking through aggregating issues into bundles. All nuance is bred out of each issue as it becomes incorporated into a party package to be accepted wholesale — like a cable deal where you can’t opt for individual strategies or solutions. It’s an all-or-nothing approach to addressing political issues that pressures the electorate to reduce the political process to the level of cheering for one’s party, like a sports team.

A two-party system cannot but lead a nation toward escalating internal strife as party positions become increasingly polarized. One party may successfully drag the other party into its ideology. However, that flexibility and willingness to accommodate the other can only go so far before the opposing party must run backwards in the opposite direction. That’s where the DNC is now, after decades of capitulating to a fascist rightwing leadership banking the complete corruption of a democratic system on the corruptibility of their opposition.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/wednesday-september-23rd-meet-middle

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Why do citizens consider themselves to be R or D?

America’s Favourite Team Sport

It’s by design. We have been deliberately manipulated into warring camps by the modern equivalent of bread and circuses to keep all the little people engaged in being cheerleaders to distract from addressing real issues to make our lives better.

Making our lives better by solving real-world problems instead of manufactured non-problems would result in smaller hoards of wealth for those who already have too much wealth.

Sadly, they have also cultivated the belief that there is no such thing as “too much wealth”. Most people extrapolate from their impoverished conditions to believe there can never be enough wealth — which, to some degree is true, just not for individuals.

Fighting a Culture War to Stop You From Fighting a Class War

People are essentially forced into one of two camps by shutting out parties beyond the two parties dominating the U.S. political landscape.

Limiting the political environment into two warring camps just makes it easier for the oligarchs to control the chaos in ways that ensure we remain distracted from their machinations as they focus on strategies for invisibly extracting microscopic amounts of blood from our bodies so that we won’t know when we’ve been weakened too much to save ourselves.

We are treated like frogs in a pot of water with a carefully monitored temperature to ensure we sweat our value out in their service while rendered too weak and distracted to fight back and save ourselves.

To survive our hardships, we turn to those who share our struggles and our values and since our options have been limited to two oppositional camps while the media owned by the oligarchs feed us conflict porn to escalate our tribal affinities and condition us to treat our neighbours like enemy combatants who must be eradicated or die at their hands.

The more we entrench ourselves into a caricature of team sports cheerleaders, the happier the plutocrats are because that frees them up to concoct creative strategies for extracting more value from all of us like the parasites they are.

The Road-Map to Success