A Rant about the Two-Party System

If I had to pick one thing about American politics that makes me the angriest, it would without a doubt be the concept of a two-party system. Except for a few exceptions, it has become almost impossible to win an election on any level in this country unless one allies him or herself with either the Republican or Democratic Party. Though this is also true of state and local elections, for the purposes of this rant, I’ll be focusing on elections for federal positions, especially the presidency. First of all, let’s start by saying that if someone is liberal on social issues but conservative on fiscal issues, he or she can basically forget about winning any kind of election. For whatever reason it has been driven into the minds of the American public that social and fiscal issues are somehow intertwined, which is completely ridiculous. The two-party system only exacerbates this problem by lumping fiscal and social conservatives in the Republican Party and their liberal counterparts in the Democratic Party.

Let’s say that somehow I was in a position where I had a legitimate shot at making a run for President of the United States. I consider myself a fiscal and civil libertarian, which basically means I want the government to stay out of both economic and social issues as much as possible. There is no way the Democratic Party would accept a fiscal conservative as a candidate, so this would just leave me with the Republicans. In order for a Republican to have a shot in hell of winning a presidential election, particularly the primaries, he has to cater to the social conservatives that seem to make up the majority of the southern United States. This means that I would have to pretend to be a social conservative myself in order to even contend. I would very much like to know when thinking the government should leave the economy alone automatically started meaning that I also had to be anti-gay rights.

Now I’m not saying that having political parties is necessarily a bad thing. Without having some kind of party system, there would just be non-stop chaos in the government. Nothing would ever get done because no one would ever be able to agree on anything. What I am saying is that there should be more than two parties that have a chance of winning elections. Probably the best way to sum up my feelings towards the two-party system would be to compare it to flavors of ice cream. (I do this partly because it’s easy to understand and partly because I’m really hungry right now.) Let’s say the only two flavors available are chocolate and vanilla, but I really like strawberry ice cream. Am I supposed to pick which flavor is closest to strawberry? Neither of them is close to strawberry! This is the same way I feel when I’m forced to pick a party during an election. Neither of them is ever close to what I want. That's all for my rant, it's time to go eat some ice cream.