Against a two-party system

I skipped over the Obama and Romney circles when I cast my ballot last week. Ironically, while placing me at the heart of the election season morass, my move to the District of Columbia after graduation actually detracted from the impact of my vote. In a district where Obama most resoundingly trumped his opponent with 91 percent support, it’s hard to feel the sense of civic affirmation that accompanied the ballot I cast in North Carolina in 2008.

The Electoral College is partly to blame, by rendering useless the votes of 3.3 million Texans who chose Obama and 4.2 million Californians (more than the entire voting body of Virginia) who voted for Romney—all while arbitrarily ballooning the importance of states like New Hampshire. But this year, I found myself taking greater offense at a problem that afflicts government more pervasively, regardless of elections: the failure of two party-dominated government.

The presidential debates set the stage for an unprecedented amount of public dissembling and shape-shifting, transforming into meaningless fluff pieces for prefabricated party platforms—nothing at all like a genuine rhetorical battle of opposing, delineated value systems. When Obama attacked Romney, he merely deflected by repositioning himself, in a well-tested tactic of creeping into the “moderate” camp as Election Day drew near. And when the disturbing issue of drone warfare in Pakistan was finally broached, there was no debate to be had because Romney had no point of contention with the president’s aggressive counterterrorism tactics.

The predictability of these farcical competitions for victory dictated by spin rooms drove home the problem of the Democrat/Republican divide as an utter failure at the levels of ideology, democracy and policy. The supposed virtue of “bipartisanship” is specious because the strategies that enable it and the policies it produces resemble nothing like the reasonable compromise and good spirited cooperation it suggests. Instead, America is presented with public policy as a misshapen amalgam of competing ideals, indebtedness to campaign donors and frustrating strategies that underlie lame duck sessions and filibusters. This is less a democracy than a perpetual chess tournament with huge corporate sponsorship.

It saddens me to see my friends with tremendous intellect and political verve working within the confines of say, the Democratic Party, when it is clear to me that there is no space for true progressivity in a system reliant on the status quo to perpetuate its own power, and where success is measured by relative advantage instead of the value of policies produced.

When I watched the “third party” debates (online only, of course), I witnessed the striking contrast of candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson speaking passionately, with conviction and sincerity—perhaps due to a political idealism available only to candidates speaking from outside the fishbowl of media scrutiny, and without the “benefit” of guidance from well-salaried strategists who work to ensure victories at the expense of honesty, consistency or plausibility. These candidates presented truly radical positions, in so far as they might constitute legitimate change: e.g., rejecting the new normal of annual military spending in excess of a trillion dollars (about a third of the federal budget), and ending the miserable War on Drugs that has wasted billions while leading to frightening levels of mass incarceration in states like California.

Unlike Obama and Romney, a scrutinizing analysis of these candidates’ policies probably doesn’t merit much time, because none stood a chance of winning. If they were given similar media attention, I assume journalists and watchdogs would find plenty of shortcomings and inconsistencies. Nonetheless, I was inspired by the only presidential debates to provide new political imagination and alternatives. If such effects are merely symbolic at this point, I’m certain they could be realized—if only they were given their due via media exposure and a public discourse conscious of the malleable ideological cores of young people like myself.

Unfortunately, youth voter turnout is consistently low, I believe in part due to an electoral system where the victors of most states are announced with certitude long before Election Day. Party pluralism would help to dissemble the obnoxious, anti-democratic swing state obsession; it would mitigate and preclude the kinds of oppositional, impotent Congressional sessions we have had to witness (no less pay for) during the last quadrennial; and it would present the possibility of a truly reflective representation of the varied and complex desires, beliefs and expectations of a rapidly diversifying American polity.