Principles VS Party

Something I've noticed a lot since becoming active in discussing politics is that so many people would rather vote for their Party on the sole basis of not letting the other side into a position of power. In fact, the majority of people seem to be like this.

A typical scenario at the voting booth is apparently:

Walk into booth.

Check off all the D/R's.

Walk out and ignore poliics for 2-4 more years.

Why is this? I understand that it may be easier to have an automatic answer to the quiz of politics and hope that party has your best interests at heart, but what happens when there isn't a difference between the parties? What happens when both parties just want to make money from special interest groups because the public is too busy hating one party over another to notice.

IMHO, the only way to cure this cancer in American politics is to disband the party system all together and have people rub solely on the merit of their policies. But that will never happen, because without parties, how will we know who we're supposed to hate.

 

Because results matter.

Because it's cowardly and lazy to retreat to the ivory tower and pontificate about your principles when there's work to be done.

If Bush had not been president, the Iraq War wouldn't have happened. Several hundred thousand people would not have been killed. This is not some small theoretical matter.

By putting noses in the air and sniffing about their high principles, Nader voters and libertarians helped bring that about. But it's not their responsibility. It never is. If you can point to your perfect principles, that excuses any catastrophe that you might help bring about.

 

The thing is, for most of us, the party does matter. I'm a pro-gun, pro-life, anti-big government person. There are almost no dems that agree with me.

 

Can you guarantee(*)that the Iraq War couldn't have happened? I'm not so sure Al Gore would have been so different. Besides, I wasn't able to vote then, so I can't answer that question honestly.

Maybe you can also point out which if the parties is also against going to war again(most likely with Iran). Because I know the republicans want it. And Obama hasn't been very consistent when it comes to preventing war, unless you've been ignoring the events of the past 3 years.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

 

I won't touch the abortion topic, since I've always believed it's a state issue, firearms are protected by the constitution, but republicans haven't really shrunk it at all in the last 12 years.

 

Yes blame principled people rather than all the people voting for the same bought and sold idiots year after year. I, for one, cannot abide such stupidity

 

I refuse to vote the lesser of 2 evils that is why I will not vote for Romney. There are plenty of third parties to vote for. I think Paul will run independent and cause the GOP to lose

 

I agree with this. Even if you're not married to one party, most of the time you'll still end up voting for the same party over and over again simply because the other side doesn't believe in the principles you stand for.

That's why I can't vote Democrat either.

I don't want to derail the thread here, but leaving abortion to the states would have been like Lincoln leaving slavery to the states. Just as you can't really have a country where someone is considered a free man in one state and property in the next, you can't really have a country where different states have different definitions of "life." That contradicts what the Declaration of Independence established about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

Parties matter because the US is a republic and not a dictatorship.

I person, regardless of his talents, cannot do squat. You have to have a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate and control of the White House. Otherwise, you have gridlock.

Remember Ross Perot? the cruelest joke the people could have played on him would have been to elect him. He would have been in the White House with no ability to do anything but nuke the Russians.

And given the parlous state of the country, gridlock is not acceptable.

Geist complains but has no improvement to offer. Its just mindless bellyaching.

 

It's not Pauls fault he's the only person in the GOP worth voting for. Maybe if the party was running someone other than a bunch of evil social "conservatives" and Obamney they could get some of the Paul vote. It's not the fault of libertarian minded people that we were kicked out of the party.

 

If Paul does run as third party, he's a bigger fool than I thought he was. He will guarantee that Obama wins, which means we all lose. The amount of damage a lame duck Obama can do in 4 yrs is frightening. If Paul does that, his political legacy will be the man who guaranteed the collapse of the nation.

 

I have to say given the direction of the nation,l gridlock is preferable to things moving as they have. We keep spending more money and playing loose with our rights. I see no reason for that to continue unimpeded.

 

We all lose if one of the current republican candidates other than Paul wins so I'm not really seeing the problem here.

 

They need to find a consensus first. Once a consensus is found, then you can make it into law. Until then, controversial issues should be discussed at a local level.

 

If he was worth voting for he would not be in last place. He is an old man that needs to retire

 

I'm gonna have to go and disagree with you. The fact that people like Santorum and Gingrich are even up there and the fact that Obamney is apparently the front runner means that GOP voters are hardly the best judges of who's worth voting for. Make Paul the nominee and you get those GOP votes, libertarians votes, and take votes from Obama. Put anyone else up there and you get GOP votes and that's it.

 

Principals and Party coincide with each other as it is the principals of the members to the Party that make up The Platform.

 

I for one can't abide priests who pontificate from up in their ivory tower, giving the working people sermons about how sinful they are.

If your boy Paul actually won, it would be cause for weeping among libertarians, because then they'd actually have to take responsibility for something. We can't have that, because the entire point of being a libertarian is that it allows you to moan about everyone else while sitting on your keister and doing nothing.

You know what perpetuates the two-party system? The campaign finance system that allows open buying of politicians. And Libertarians fight tooth and nail to preserve that system. Libertarians are the most loyal lackies of the two-party system on the planet, so it's laughable to watch them complaining about it. You want some respect, come down out of the ivory tower and into the mud with the rest of us pigs. Actually work against the two party system, instead of just paying lip service to opposing it.

 

Nah, mamooth - not theoretical. Fantasy.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps9j22G9HLE"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps9j22G9HLE[/ame]

[QUOTE[By putting noses in the air and sniffing about their high principles, Nader voters and libertarians helped bring that about. But it's not their responsibility. It never is. If you can point to your perfect principles, that excuses any catastrophe that you might help bring about.[/QUOTE]

And it doesn't hurt to have incredible confirmation bias and and even more incredibly short memory, eh mamooth?

 

The two party system is perpetuated by the people who refuse to vote for a party other than the two circus tents.

 

With everyone voting principle rather than party, and I'd assume most people being the average voter who votes for one party or the other, what exactly are the principles those parties have that make them so desirable to the majority of the population? The only consistent principles of the republican party I see are hypocrisy and outright blatant support of the rich and corporations. The only consistent principles I see of the democratic party is that they don't think past what sounds good and end up with lots of unintended consequences and they love to talk about attacking the rich while not actually doing anything.

 

I disagree.

The two party system is perpetuated by the system itself. Since - ideally - two parties would indicate a polarity, it should be pretty easy for people to determine (at least generally) to which side they tend. This was the case for many decades in this country.

The problem is when the two parties start to take on manifestations of one another, as has happened more in the last 20 years. Now, there's a problem - a problem that would normally correct itself through the rise of a consequential 3rd party: candidates from a 3rd party would normal have arisen out of some dissatisfaction in the choices of the other two, tending towards realigning the platforms and actual practices of one of the other two parties (whichever one has gone so astray).

But the manner in which voting is set up squelches the rise of a consequential 3rd party. A vote for a 3rd party candidate to "send a message" to the larger parties never gets cast, because however much that voter wants to send a message, they shy away from casting it because they still identify far more with one party than the other, and they worry - justifiably so - that this protest vote simply enables the win for the candidate which they would have least preferred.

So they abstain.

And we continue to get increasingly screwed as party operatives continue to take advantage of this reality to engage in all sorts of behaviours and activities that the American public would normally revile.

We need to fix our voting system. It would correct so many ills in Washington - which is why it will be incredibly difficult to get done.

Those ills are now embedded into positions of power.

 

Yes people vote against people rather than the people they believe in. I understand that and that's the problem. I wouldn't be opposed to reforming the system, maybe do something like run-off voting, but in the end the issue is the people voting for the same two parties. It's not the fault of the people voting for third parties; they're the only people helping at this point by trying to break up the system, and it's not the fault of campaign funding as was suggested earlier. It's the fault of the people who go into the booth and say "well I don't like this guy, but I don't like this guy more so I'm gonna vote against him rather than for the guy I actually agree with."

 

What's not theoretical? You're raving and not making any sense.

1998. Clinton says Saddam had WMD, because Saddam actually had WMD at the time. Then Clinton called Saddam's bluff, forces him to accept the U.N. inspectors, and the WMD are destroyed. Which would be why there were no WMD left when Bush demanded war.

Was your failure here in basic history, or basic logic?

Remember Subdermal, you're not talking to one of your fellow herd members. You're talking to a member of the reality-based community, a liberal. Unlike your side, I'm not completely butt-ignorant of both history and logic.

Anyways, thanks for proving my point so ably, showing why voting for a flawed Democrat was a good thing, being that he eliminated Saddam's WMD.

 

They get things done. To non-ivory-tower people, that matters.

And that's why they reject libertarians. You're being rejected by all sides because they don't like your do-nothing attitude. While no one is stopping you from remaining in denial and declaring that everyone else is just a bunch of sheep, such denial will ensure you remain a fringe party forever.