Thursday, November 29, 2007

Multiparty... Single Party... Mario Party...?

So basically this entire post will be about what I think on this whole American party system issue we've been talking about in class. Though I think it is obvious that the best way to party is the Mario Party (by the way, Yoshi is by far the best character in the game), it really has no relevance to this topic. I just thought it would be fun to include in there. So as of right now I'm not really sure which way I'm leaning on this topic, but I just sorta plan to write about it and hopefully by the end I will have addressed enough of the arguments to decide for myself which side I'm on.
First of all, I really don't care about what the founding father thought about this topic. Though most people wouldn't like to admit it, there is a lot of things the founding fathers didn't want us to do that are part of our culture today. In fact, if you really look at it we really aren't following their wishes in the majority of what we do, but that's sort of off topic. In this particular case, we decided to ignore their ideas long ago when we went to a two party system so that is really irrelevant now. I personally am a fan of having everybody's ideas represented in Congress. For this reason I am a fan of the multiparty system. It's pretty obvious that the political spectrum as represented by a single line (which is really how we are doing it with a two party system) is not really a good way to gauge people's political views anymore, if it ever was. It would definitely be better in my opinion if I could vote for somebody who had views that were very close to mine, so I could be positive that my views are heard in Congress. A big argument against the multiparty system is that a candidate could win with say 80% of the population not having voted for them. While this certainly sounds bad, I don't think it is necessarily that different from today. For one, taken on a post-election level today we only have about 3 of every 10 people who approve of our president, yet we seem to be getting along fine. Sure things could be better, but it isn't all that bad. And even in an election the way we have it today: say the winner wins with 47% of the vote. I guarantee you that a very healthy part of that 47% did not even necessarily want that person to win. The candidate maybe only shared one of their many views, but they fit better under his big tent than the other persons. Also, many people vote just so "that other guy doesn't win." I personally don't think that the difference between true 20% support in a multiparty system (assuming it only gets that high. it would never really split evenly among 5 or 6 or however many groups. depending on the times i'm sure there would be strong favor towards certain parties) and the 30% of the nation who really voted for a candidate because they support the majority of his views that we get in a two party system. Granted, I really am sort of spitballing with my numbers here, and it really is mostly speculation but I hope you can see that there is some validity in those statements.
However, there is one big thing that really bothers me about the multiparty system. It is that one fatal flaw of democracy, the bureaucracy that accompanies it. Everybody knows that it can take years for important issues to get resolved as it stands now, and I can't imagine how it would get done in a multiparty Congress. I just don't trust our politicians to be able to resolve their differences and come to a solid conclusion. As sad as it is, I actually prefer the block voting we get now from our two parties, because at least it usually resolves things. You just have to hope that you are covered by whatever little piece of that tent you fit under.

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