Programming the Two-Party System

Our democratic system in the US exists to manipulate enough voters to give specific people power to siphon off a bit more from the federal trough. The brilliance of the banks buying the Democrats in the ’90s was buying the party completely committed to political life having cover from the media. As much as people make fun of the GOP, the liberal and progressive pragmatists of the Left are naked about wanting power—forget principles. All vectors are about securing more votes and power. To get that kind of commitment, it takes programming people to see themselves as party members first, thinking humans second (or at all). That commitment today has been driven deep into the core of our identity.

A poll by The Hill a few months after the 2012 election revealed some of the stupidity of political identification. A majority of voters supported using budget cuts and not adding taxes to solve the deficit problem. The poll specifics showed how Democrats were the party to support an idea not normally associated with the Democrats, with Republican voters answering along ideological norms. When the poll asked which party they trusted more on budget issues, the need to identify with one’s own clan, one’s own thede, showed up, as well as the need to run away from the GOP. Neither article linked is truthful on the way the poll was done. A simple analysis from The Hill was especially heavy on discussing the GOP brand issue after the “bruising general election”—a “bruising general election” where they retained their majority in the House and were a few hundred thousand votes from victory in key states for the Presidency.

The other view is that the media has made the GOP a toxic name and hurt the GOP. This makes sense when one considers the attention given to a lane closure on a bridge in New Jersey by Gov. Chris Christie versus the avoidance of a myriad of scandalous acts by the Obama administration. The number-two Democrat in California’s state assembly, Leland Yee, was connected to the Triads and involved in foreign arms running, corruption and other acts that ’80s action film villains would pause at doing, yet he received a cursory glance from the media’s spotlight. That constant slant does help the electorate move Left, hurting the appeal of even basic ideas like fixing a spending problem.

The Hill’s poll guts show that they did not ask some important follow-up questions to figure out if these people even understood what they were doing. The Hill did not ask the respondents who stated support for the Democrats budget handling right after answering the opposite a question or so earlier: Why? Why did they change? Was it knee-jerk instinct? If the respondent had been told which idea belonged to which party, would the results have been the same? That is what The Hill wants readers to think, but the poll did not do that. It still might have shown the same odd switch in back-to-back questions. We do not know. We are only told that voters like a GOP idea but not the ideas of the GOP.

Even without specifics, the poll does reveal the ignorance of voters to say they support an idea, yet not realize that their answer on which party they trust more on the very same concept contradicts their first two answers. Politics has become tribal, and this is not just due to immigration and multiculturalism. In 1960, 5% of Americans would have been upset for a child to marry a member of the other party. In 2010, it was 40%. The rise has been steady, with a recent uptick. How much difference between the two parties is there? This is one of the basic choices in life: marriage. America has moved so far into open-minded territory that we have near universal approval of interracial marriage and rapidly growing approval of gay marriage, but nearly half of us do not want our kids to marry one of them. It is a sick result of destroying communal bonds in private life. You might bowl alone, but at a Tea Party rally or Occupy Wall Street protest, you can be amongst friends, you can belong, you can feel part of something.