A HOUSE DIVIDED? MAYBE NOT.

Welcome back to our discontented and often cynical reports on the status quo of the American political system. Please forgive me for having taken time off from writing in order to get married (hence the new last name), move living situations again, and begin to pursue my dream of a legal education.

We revisit this blog right now, not in hopes of convincing you, the reader, to share completely in our dissatisfactions and opinions. Rather, we invite you to consider, engage, and debate with our findings, so as we clash and wrestle with the current state of our society, we might work together to agree in how to promote the improvement thereof. JS Mill once said, “If any opinion be compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.”

I write today, because I’ve been disturbed by our last election. We read headlines of a gridlocked and stalemate system. We hear foreign news agencies facilitating debates as to whether or not the American system is now broken. We witnessed a drop in voter turnout by over 20% of the entire population compared to the last election (SOURCE). This is by far the most disturbing aspect for me. For when the people are willingly choosing to abstain from an election, we know that the people’s opinions have been silenced. The danger, then, according to Mill, would be the supposition of the infallibility of those opinions that seem to prevail in our current status quo.

This blog does not believe all to be lost. Rather, perhaps all is merely beginning...
Anthony Downs once summarized, in his most famous work, his economic theory for the interworking of democracies and the interactions between voters and parties (SOURCE). He extrapolates on how the majority of voters, in the standard two-party system, remain mostly in the middle of the two parties when voting. The strategy for both parties, therefore, would likely be the gradual shifting of these parties, closer and closer to the middle point in their ideologies in order to safely win over the voters in the middle, without losing too many of the voters that remain on their respective fringes. The shifting of the two parties, in our case, seems to have resulted in the homogenization of the left and right into one super-political party.

We saw how the floosy rhetoric of abstractly positive concepts such as “hope” and “change” and “cooperation” helped win a landslide victory in our last presidential election. Because it only took these feel-good platforms, and an attractive character to spout them, in order to satisfy voters on both spectrums, it is not surprising to me to have seen a shift in power to the opposition Republicans in the House of Representatives just two short years later. The shift in voter preference does not seem to come entirely from a sense of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, but also from a lack of participation due to an inability to be able to differentiate between the goals, beliefs, records, and therefore trustworthiness of the two parties.

I say this because it is clear the people still believe voting to be important. A recent federal government survey found that 93% of infrequent voters agree that voting is an important part of being a citizen. Also, 81% of nonvoters agreed it is an important way to voice their opinions on issues that affect their families and communities (SOURCE). If this is true than people choose not to vote because (a) they believe issues facing the federal government no longer affect their families or communities, (b) they believe neither party to have unique solutions to the issues at hand affecting their families, rendering voting a waste of time, or (c) they believe neither party to have ANY solution, still rendering voting a waste of time.

We will try to prove next week, given any of these three scenarios, why all of this gives way to an opportunity for the emergence of a third and new party to become one of the major two, turning our status quo into our generation’s political revolution...

-E.C.Mignanelli