No More Parties
I’ve heard it said that one of the ways in which the human mind facilitates the processing of information is to categorize. If that’s true, then it’s easy to understand how and why different ideologies come to be grouped under one heading. The unfortunate consequence of categorization, however, seems to be generalization, and people taking shortcuts in their attempts to understand the external world. Racism, sexism, classism, and many other “isms” allow people to group a set of phenomena based on common characteristics all the while disregarding the need to understand these phenomena individually. While I could take this analysis in many different directions, in this article I want to focus on one particular kind of categorization that I view as detrimental to free thought, that being the political party.
The problem I am speaking of is prominent in the United States, where with the exception of fringe parties such as Green, Progressive, and Reform, it seems as though all political ideology must fall under the “Democratic” or “Republican” umbrella. If we are to assume that these two power parties represent the diverse interests of nearly 300 million people, then that means a great deal of ideology has been compressed to fit into a mere two categories. The terms “Democrat” and “Republican” are often interchanged with the terms “liberal” and “conservative”, which purportedly specify the general stances of each party. Broadly speaking, liberals tend to view social and economic problems as resulting from external factors, i.e. they downplay the responsibility of the individual. Conservatives tend to view those same problems as resulting from internal factors, i.e. they practically disregard the influence of external factors.
This ideological divide is analogous to the nature vs. nurture argument. By now, psychologists and biologists acknowledge that a person is shaped by both factors, although the balance cannot be identified with any certainty. If confronted with the question of “nature or nurture?” it is likely that any sensible person, liberal or conservative, would answer “Both”. Yet, in spite of that, liberalism and conservatism in the purest senses both contradict this common sensibility.
Furthermore, the terms liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, have become labels. If you are liberal, it must mean that you are Pro-Choice with regards to abortion, in favor of Affirmative Action, in favor of increasing funding to social programs like welfare, and against the war in Iraq. If you are conservative the opposite must be true; you must be strictly pro-life, regard Affirmative Action as “reverse discrimination”, view welfare as “handouts to bums”, and fully support the war in Iraq. In actuality, these issues are all quite complicated, deserving of individual consideration. However, individual consideration seems to run contrary to the brain’s natural inclination to categorize.
In other words, it is much easier simply to subscribe holistically to one set of political ideologies or another, one political party or the other. It becomes even easier when political ideologies are handed down from one generation to the next, or when they are wed to religious dogma. A person, in blind conformist fashion, may align him or herself with the political party of their parents, who may themselves have followed their own parents. People may align themselves with the same political party as do the majority of other people with whom they share common morals or beliefs. Worst of all, if a person supports one ideology strongly enough, that may give them cause to subscribe to ALL of the ideologies advocated by a political platform, even going as far as to undermine their own interests in other areas.
This is particularly common when it comes to basing political ideals on religious morals, as many middle and lower class Christian conservatives vote Republican because of the party’s position against abortion and homosexual marriages, which they view as sins. What they fail to recognize, however, is that it is this same party which institutes economic policies that cripple the lower income brackets. Still, perhaps a hard life is preferable to offending God. On the other side, you may find staunch liberals taking an anti-everything-conservative position, which by default places them in the Democratic camp. However, given the Democratic Party’s recent pattern of impotence, and catering to private interests in wake of their true constituency’s political apathy, they may not even represent the interests of liberal ideologues.
The real point here, though, is that political parties themselves are one of the greatest flaws of any political system. Spewing rhetoric from under one ideological umbrella or another, politicians are able to placate the undereducated masses who blindly place their faith in a party, assuming that it will represent their broad range of personal interests. Political parties give people an excuse not to do individual research on individual issues, and to those without equal access to education, they provide a popular brand name which masks the actual quality of the product.
The truth is that no party, Democrats or Republicans, Greens or Reformers, can truly and adequately represent the diverse and fluctuating needs of an entire nation. Candidates should not be allowed to hide behind elephants and donkeys, escaping the necessity of giving every issue individual consideration. They should not be allowed to hide their true agendas behind red and blue screens. And people should not eschew political brainstorming and discourse in exchange for blind support of one banner or the other. Parties should be abolished, and replaced with genuine candidates, their political viability determined by their particular balance of “liberal” and “conservative” ideology.
