Sunday, May 10, 2009

There's No Political Party for Me

There's no political party for me. And even if there somehow were, it'd probably be so small that it'd essentially be powerless anyway.

That doesn't change the fact that I'll sooner die than ever vote for the GOP, which means I need to vote Democratic or else the GOP wins. But it is sad that there really is no party I can be for.

Then again, Barney Frank on Bill Maher said something that did at least slightly brighten my hopes. He pointed out that the majority of Democrats really do vote progressive and do the things that I would probably want them to do (well, he wasn't referring to me, but I know what he meant). The problem is that the rethuglicans stick together as a block, so even if only like 20-25% of the Democrats split off, that is enough to kill any progressive legislation.

Still, a party that is 80/20 what I'd want much of the time is at least slightly encouraging, especially when the total number of Republicans may drop over the next few cycles. I really shouldn't get my hopes up too much, but maybe something good will come.

The basic problem, as always, is that the Democratic party has no backbone and the GOP is expert at ruthlessly exploiting power, even if they only have a little bit of power to exploit.

It scares me that the GOP is so completely batshit crazy right now. Anti-science, xeonophobic, theocratic (and so anti-atheist), authoritarian, and so completely hypocritical as evidenced by the instant 180 degree changes in position they had as soon as Obama took office. It boggles my mind that anyone with any intelligence at all could ever support the GOP with all of the crazy shit they are doing and saying now. I can certainly understand why people would not want to support the Democratic party, but the Democratic party, agree or disagree, is not run by batshit crazies like the GOP is. What really scares me is that the GOP, despite all of this, is going to regain power someday, and they will do it without changing one bit how they are acting now. Odds are it will happen sooner than the damage from the 8 years of Bush can be repaired, and we'll go even deeper into a hole. That's my fear.

All I can do now is hope that that doesn't happen, but I pretty much am resigned to it.

I also am hoping that we'll see torture prosecutions, or at the very least, a lot of disbarrments, but I won't hold my breath. I do know that if there aren't even disbarrments (of Bybee and Yoo and all of the other lawyers involved in the torture memos), I am going to be extremely pissed off and also sad that the rule of law is dead in this country.

I sometimes fantasize about going off and forming a colony on another planet or on a space station, founded by rational people and with a rational, rule-of-law government. A society founded by ratoinal, sensible atheists. Of course, this will not happen anytime soon, and I also fear that even if you did make a decent society that way, generations down the line, it would devolve back into madness. I wonder if there is really any way to avoid that. Oh well. I can always at least play Civilization IV and dream.

4 comments:

Larry Hamelin said...

Political parties exist precisely to disenfranchise the individual voter under bourgeois faux-democracy.

DBB said...

It doesn't help that it is winner take all with no second or third choices mattering.

hedera said...

On the other hand, in countries like Israel where it isn't winner take all, you get microscopic weirdo parties like Shas wielding power way beyond their size, because the little parties peel off support from the larger ones, who then have to cajole them into coalitions in order to govern at all.

Every silver lining has its cloud.

DBB said...

We have microscopic weirdo constituences getting total dominance in our country because of the GOP - namely, the religious whack-jobs that make up the bulk of the GOP base.

They wield ridiculous power, or did. But I would strike a happy medium. I mean, we won't have a parlimentary system, so that won't happen. What we could do is change the elections such that you can seleect a second/third/fourth choice, with a requirement of a majority to win, so that people can safely vote for, say, a third party candidate who most closely matches his or her views without that then leading to the election of the major party candidate with the exact opposite views. Then candidates would have to start paying attention to more issues rather than just looking for one or two big "wedge" issues, as seems to be the only GOP strategy left.