I have very little doubt that more options would produce better candidates who would be forced to be the best they can be. Think about it this way – if there were more than two parties, some of them would have policies in common, which in turn would prevent people from just voting along party lines. If you’re someone who is adamantly opposed to abortion and there are three parties who are as well, your vote would go to the best candidate as opposed to the ONE who is anti-abortion. Just an example…

Instead of putting more power in the hands of parties, diversity would ultimately give more power to the people who keep said parties afloat – if their party isn’t doing enough to keep them happy, they’d turn to another. In other words, parties would be more accountable to the people. For representatives who refuse to fall in line, they too could turn to another party as politicians do in most other democratic countries. Here it is a big deal for a red person to turn blue or vice versa.

My argument is not about parties per se, but choices. I don’t like the concept of political parties but having several of them is better than having just two. Shit, give us three or four… Of course, the more parties there are, the messier things get. Look at Lebanon!

But Americans need more choices. This is indeed a great nation and its people have unlimited potential that sadly goes unrealized when they’re kept complacent. I also believe the way our government is structured to be superior to most others. The problem is with the leading players. The only benefit of a two-part system is its inferred simplicity. But politics are complicated and oversimplifying them is the best way to prevent people from getting their hands messy and doing things that need to be done. There’s no easier way to keep people from actually thinking about the role of government (something they need to do if they’re voting) than to give them a choice of this or that. They’re supposed to be opposites, but who’s to say someone calling for strict gun control can’t support globalization, or that a warmonger can’t be in favor of abortion, or that a good Christian person can’t vote for someone who supports gay rights?

As far as the two candidates go let me say this: Obama is the perfect one for the Democrats – the reasons he is a long shot are the same reasons he appeals to so many. As far as McCain’s longshot status goes, his candidacy is a testament to the problems inside the Republican party now (Kerry was a longshot too). I think if the Republicans had a stronger candidate, Obama would stand much less of a chance than he currently does.

As you can tell, I can go on and on about this stuff, so I’ll stop now.

Regarding the two-party vs. multi-party question, I just want to say a couple things. First, I think it’s doubtful that the system would provide better candidates. More, perhaps; proportional representation would guarantee even small parties minimal representation in a legislature. But it would also put much more power into the hands of parties. People would no longer vote for individuals; they would vote a party line. This would make party loyalty even more critical than it is now: a representative who disagreed with a party platform on even a single issue would be under greater pressure to fall in line. For single-issue voters who can find a party that represents their interests in toto, this might be fine; but for the large number of Americans who care about a range of issues and vote for individuals rather than parties, it could be just another reason to stand on the sidelines. Plus, consider your reference to the Founding Fathers: they certainly wanted to avoid faction, as Federalist No. 10 shows. It was unavoidable, as you note, and now we have two parties. But how much worse would the factionalization be if we had 5, or 15, or 50 parties, each of which demanded strict loyalty from its members?

My point is that we have a policy choice to make, between two different forms of democratic government. That we have chosen one form does not make us less of a democracy. We still live by the principle of “one person, one vote,” even if the end result of that voting differs. Our perception about how much this “counts” is irrelevant and could be equally dismal in a two-party or a multi-party system: in the former, we can tell ourselves we have to pick between the lesser of two evils; in the latter, we can tell ourselves we must pick the issue that’s most important to us, and watch as the party touting that issue flails helplessly in a fragmented legislature. Either way, we citizens still hold the power and pick our leaders by voting. I don’t believe it is our place to refrain from doing so because we feel our voices are too faint.

I’ve given the rest of my defense of the two-party system before, so I won’t go through it again. The bigger point which I think needs to be made, though, is that democracy is difficult business. There’s good reason for the old saying that it’s the worst form of government, except everything else. I’m sure we’d all be happier in a country with a benevolent dictator, who let us live our lives freely and acted with infinite wisdom in deciding when that freedom needed to be curtailed. Unfortunately, such a place will never exist. In a pluralistic country, where millions of people disagree on millions of things, the day will NEVER come when a candidate who we identify with in every way is elected to the highest office in the land. A politician in such a country will always be making compromises and concessions. And that, in my opinion, is a good thing. While our system is far from perfect, it is still responsive to the needs and wants of the American people: consider that after a 20 month campaign and a primary cycle with record voter turnout, two long-shot candidates are approaching the finish line, and one of them is a 47 year old black man from Chicago who would not have made it without the grassroots support of millions of Americans. For all our faults, we live in a great and democratic nation.

I was very happy to see the final sentence of this post. I respect your views about American politics a great deal. I hope that in the future, you will carry them into the voting booth and give them effect by voting for the party, or person, who shares your principles.

questions like: What is government? What is it for? What does it do? How does it do it? never come up, and yet we’re carrying on a discussion of how to get a better field of candidates as if we were all on a corporate search committee.

What we do need is cultural change. From sportscasts attempting to make “role models” of athletes not because of their discipline, but because they “give back” to the community, through calls by both presidential candidates for some form of mandatory national servitude,our culture is saturated and drowning in the “ethic of public service”.Far more people need to understand the nature of individual rights — not Obama’s “brother’s keeper” nor McCain’s “for the greater good of the country” nonsense, but oh for the day when a politician delivers a line like “Each man is sovereign” — and the proper role of the government.

Until that happens, we will remain in an inherently unstable mixed economy that will alternately drift and lurch towards totalitarianism. The government will increasingly attempt the impossible: replace the minds of millions of individuals with bureaucrats and inflexible rules in order to run an economy for 300 million plus. This will cause problems, which the government will expand to attempt to “fix” ad infinitum.

just some food for thought.