Time to Get Out of the Mud
We should be proud of our two-party democratic electoral system.
When democracies struggle in the mud of extreme partisan invective, they can’t perform their function. Many cannot survive.
Willingness to accept the other party’s electoral victories is a defining characteristic of a successful democracy. Campaigns leading up to an election can be “hard ball.” But their purpose is to produce temporary winners, to pause conflict so that a government can function. So that one side of important ongoing conflicts can take over the responsibility of maintaining peace and safety and enact some of the new legislation they have proposed. It is an enforced truce, while “the losers” rebuild their opposition and prepare to fight another day.
There are many limits built into a modern government system. Winners are not able to run the table. But they do get some breathing room. Think of it this way. You can’t leave some questions unresolved. Permanent battle without a temporary pause to allow one side to try out their ideas, is permanent stalemate, a stalemate that can only be ended by a “permanent” victory, a government imposed by force to rule by force, with the opposition underground and committed to revolution.
This is what we risk when we engage in mindless invective and refuse to accept election outcomes and assume that a temporary victory by the other side, a truce that allows them to govern, for a short period of time, would be world-ending. It might be hilarious, if not so dangerous. Children playing with explosives.
Policies overlap, values overlap, interests overlap. Our side does not have all the right answers. And, they have some good ideas. And we both love our country and want peace with justice. That’s “the system,” our system of government, in good times.
The whole system goes off the rails when we form mobs that storm the good intentions of the other side with mindless invective. The traditional democratic two-party system supports an often-desirable temporary change of governments as one party replaces the other and the other becomes the loyal opposition. There are ideas waiting in the wings that need to be tried. It serves us well when we don’t let campaign rhetoric, and the tactics of win-by-any-means candidates, undermine our fundamental trust in each other. When we don’t let cutthroat competition between competing advertising-based monoliths (modern cable news sources) package us into fanatics.
I am reading some of the strangest filth and misrepresentation on social (social?) media. Hopefully, it is all produced by hostile IA robots to undermine our civilization.
Then it would be darkly comic. I prefer to laugh, however, in more wholesome ways.
OK, a final note. I probably have written close to this in the past. Sorry, if it sounds repetitive.
However, I’m going to keep yelling “fire,” and try to throw another bucket of water, as well as I can, on what I consider out of control.