Is Bipartisanism Bad?

by Tex Norman⁽⁶³⁾

If the Democratic Party fails to deliver meaningful health care reform because they sacrifice everything meaningful on the altar of bipartisanism, then progressives will have to consider forming a more representative political party.. Actually Republicans could do with the creation of new parties as well. If anything has become clear to me in the last year it is that our two major parties do not represent well the diversity of the citizenry.

The two party system makes things easy for people who are not big fans of thought. Non-thinkers, and rare-thinkers tend to like everything simple. If there is a yes and a no then you have a 50/50 chance of being right. It is human nature to like a multiple choice test over an essay test, and to prefer a true/false test over a multiple choice test. The problem is that when you try to fit everyone, every political philosophy, every bias and preference into two big groups you get two groups filled with people who don’t agree much with their fellow party members.

Consider the Republican Party, a defeated, damaged, struggling group in a rebuilding stage. If you think all Republicans think alike, you don’t know much about Republicans.

· There are Republicans who are liberal on human rights issues, that have little problem with gay issues, abortion, but they feel strongly about limiting the size of government and prefer fewer regulations and taxes on business because they feel it hinders economic growth for the nation.
· Some Republicans have less interest in promoting business, but they are driven to use the Republican Party to take their religious believes and enact (impose) them on the nation as law.
· Some Republicans just hate government, they see government as the cause of all our problems, and they want the federal government to be so small.

My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.
Grover Norquist

Let us move to the fractured Democratic Party. I try to be civil and open minded about the Republican Party, but I can’t trust my attempts at being unbiased because I am bias, and a little miffed, especially by the obvious lies being regurgitated by elected Republicans who know they are lying at the moment they lie. As a progressive Democrat I have stronger negative feelings about the differences in my own political party.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!
Will Rogers

Consider the Blue Dog Democrats, a group of moderate and conservative Democratic Party members that promote, among other things, fiscal conservatism and accountability.

It is hard to believe, but there are still Yellow Dog Democrats: The term Yellow Dog Democrat first showed up around 1928 and was a self-describing term for true believer democrats. If these folk looked at a ballot and there were two candidates, one was a yellow dog running as a democrat, and the other was a human Republican they would always vote for the yellow dog. (Obviously, there is a Republican equivalent, but I am not sure they have a name.)

There are Democrats that believe government should be small. There are Democrats that believe moral and religious views should be made law (no gay marriage, no abortion).

Having two parties may be efficient. Having two parties may make the math easier, but I wonder if the two party system wise. Republicans and Democrats are trying to negotiate with one another, but the two sides have no consensus among themselves. Republicans can negotiate because they don’t agree among themselves on what they want and what they believe. Their party has fiscal conservatives but they are being pressured and swayed by Birthers and racists and people who claim to believe that there is a health reform plan that is written to authorize Democrats to kill grandma, or other Republicans, or woman with breast cancer. There are Democrats attempting to negotiate without a spine, with so much fear that they will not retain power that they are conceding their principals in the hopes of keeping their pole numbers up.

Article submitted Thursday, September 03, 2009 & read 230 times.

Leave your comments through Kerplop:

No comments yet.

54-0-0-1-3

Most Recent