Young people today are politically independent. They have little allegiance to-or faith in-the established political parties and institutions. The media often describe this as "apathy," but CUIP believes it is something entirely different; We believe that young people want to make a better world, and they are smart enough to know that the existing political arrangement will not produce qualitative development.
If we had run-off or proportional of some sort it would work. As it is now, a third party is impossible. It's like, what, the first think you learn about in poli sci?
In any other country in the world the Democrats would be a centre party, or even a centre-right party (in traditional British terms, they?re somewhere between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, for example.) But in America, you can seriously make them out to be extremists, even traitors, and hope to get away with it. At its best, this is just nasty, nasty politics. At its worst it?s an attempt to justify a particularly ugly kind of extremism that seems to me be quite contrary to the traditional American values of libertarianism, tolerance, freedom of thought and of speech.
You wouldn?t be able to get away with it just about anywhere else in the world, apart from, say Zimbabwe, because the difference between the equivalent parties would be so slight.
So what America needs is a proper left wing party, preferably with ?Socialist? in the name.
The Democrats can then become the centre party, all three parties might be freed up a bit from doctrine-bound policy making and it might be possible to rejuvenate cross-party political dialogue a bit.
Three won't cut it. If there's going to be a meaningful change there has to be at least four or five IMO. The platforms would not be an issue, all that's required there is some fragmentation of the existing parties, combined with some new ideas said parties don't push / promote.
I could envision something like:
Republican = mostly hard-line right on all topics
Democrat = mostly hard-line left on all topics
Centrist = the people from the existing two parties who are not inclined to voting for any type of hard-liner policy, and who have a mix of liberal and conservative tendancies. For example, they could be hawkish on defense but also pro-environment, and so on.
Social Democrat = people who are minimally interested in all things foreign, defense, etc and instead are focused on all of our social problems (healthcare, privacy rights, urban renewal programs, etc).
Capitalist (couldn't think of a better name) = people who are minimally interested in working through social policy, but rather are focused on improving our standard of living through educational, economic and business policies.
Obviously they would require better definition but you get the idea. Either way I don't think a third party alone would do much good unless many moderates from the existing parties left to help form the new one.
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Young people today are politically independent. They have little allegiance to-or faith in-the established political parties and institutions. The media often describe this as "apathy," but CUIP believes it is something entirely different; We believe that young people want to make a better world, and they are smart enough to know that the existing political arrangement will not produce qualitative development.
Originally posted by 709
I know that was a joke, but given the state of the American nowadays, it wouldn't suprise me if our next 'leader' was elected on Fox.
It's not a joke
You wouldn?t be able to get away with it just about anywhere else in the world, apart from, say Zimbabwe, because the difference between the equivalent parties would be so slight.
So what America needs is a proper left wing party, preferably with ?Socialist? in the name.
The Democrats can then become the centre party, all three parties might be freed up a bit from doctrine-bound policy making and it might be possible to rejuvenate cross-party political dialogue a bit.
Anne Coulter would hate that.
*droool*
I could envision something like:
Republican = mostly hard-line right on all topics
Democrat = mostly hard-line left on all topics
Centrist = the people from the existing two parties who are not inclined to voting for any type of hard-liner policy, and who have a mix of liberal and conservative tendancies. For example, they could be hawkish on defense but also pro-environment, and so on.
Social Democrat = people who are minimally interested in all things foreign, defense, etc and instead are focused on all of our social problems (healthcare, privacy rights, urban renewal programs, etc).
Capitalist (couldn't think of a better name) = people who are minimally interested in working through social policy, but rather are focused on improving our standard of living through educational, economic and business policies.
Obviously they would require better definition but you get the idea. Either way I don't think a third party alone would do much good unless many moderates from the existing parties left to help form the new one.