Originally published in the Batesville Daily Guard
We are going to see a lot of changes in
2017 — changes that are going to make some people very happy, some
very unhappy and others just frustrated with the process in general.
Over the last few decades, our
government has become a see-saw of sorts as the two big parties,
Democrats and Republicans, move away from the middle and embrace more
narrow ideals of what is considered “liberal” and “conservative.”
The election of 2016 drove that home with two huge personalities,
President-elect Donald Trump and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders,
essentially becoming the human embodiments of the bases, or at least
the most enthusiastic, of their respective parties.
People who live and breathe politics,
particularly those who think in terms of “right vs. left” don’t
have a problem with this. For them, it’s more a battle of good vs.
evil and shaping the government to fit a vision instead of filling
the potholes and making sure the trains run on time. It’s sort of
like the “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” cliché,
except instead of throwing the baby out, the argument is to either
give the kid a bath in a frozen lake or a boiling kettle.
That sounds a little extreme, but we
seem to be in pretty extreme times, at least politically. It seems we
are rapidly approaching a chaotic time when we are going to see
things built up in one election thrown out in the next and then the
things built during that government are thrown out with the next.
That’s not what anyone would call stability. It’s just a mess.
There’s always the talk about the
need of people to support a third party, but the minor parties of the
U.S. tend to have even more extreme philosophies. Americans
constantly poll that they do want a third party, but none that exist
really seem to offer what they want.
What do they want?
Probably some sort of calming
influence, a balance of sorts.
In most democracies, there are two
major parties like ours, usually center-left and center-right and a
lot of fringe parties. But there are also often third parties who may
not be the same size as the big two, but not as small as the fringe,
that take more moderate positions and make themselves necessary for
the larger parties to form a governing coalition. In a way, acting as
sort of a middle weight that slides slightly to balance the board and
keep it from becoming a seesaw of back and forth policies —
stability you could say.
Right now, it would seem an opportune
time for such a thing. The 2016 election saw the lowest voter turnout
since 1996. In 1996, only 53.5 percent of voter-age Americans turned
out for the election. In 2016 that number was 55 percent, much lower
than 64 percent of voter-age Americans who cast ballots in 2008.
Those numbers say people are either indifferent or just turned off by
the current offerings.
And really, who can blame them? With
people on both sides of the political aisle more interested in making
pronouncements or condemnations, those who want to be outside of
partisan fights are either ignored or attacked. That does not get
them interested in turning out for the polls.
Of course, a viable third-party
probably won’t happen anytime soon. In the U.S., third parties have
a habit of not going for modest goals — like running for local,
state and congressional offices — but instead seem to center around
capturing the presidency.
Sure, capturing the presidency is
probably the ultimate goal of any political party, but sometimes four
or five people in Congress can make as big of a difference when it
comes to things that affect people’s lives as well as balancing
partisan ideology.
It may only be a pipe dream, but I do
hope to one day see a government where there are some adults in the
room.
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