Ted Rall for March 31, 2010

Dear Americans,

You NEED more parties. A party system is no Utopia. However, it take money, organisation and a lot more to be in government. Individuals can’t do it alone. That is the grand fiction of the USA, no any individual cannot be president. It take more than that. It takes Organisation. The best part of the party system is it promotes compromise and cooperation. That is required if you are to be leaders for a country of 300 million people.

But the two parties you have now are a trap. They are institutions that are only self interested and do not advance common political ideas in any constructive way.

Probably the Green party is the way to go because it is big enough. But it has to be a real concrete effort, not a fringe effort. Right now your 2 party system is a joke to the rest of the world. Most places in the world maybe have 2 main parties but lots of other viable ones that function to slowly introduce the fringe ideas of change into the mainstream. In other countries the 2 main parties change over time and get replaced. This use to happen in the US but it stopped for some reason. I don’t know why but it maybe happend around the time the Republicans switched from being the “progressive” party to the Democrats. You stuck with the same 2 parties rather than construct a new better one to encompass the new ideas of the time (like reasonable people would do)

Anyway what you have now is Zero chance for fringe ideas of real change to get incorporated into the system and so you get more and more polarised extremes. The system is just getting more and more fascistic - that is, offering simple rhetorical solutions that are out of touch with reality. Like using scapegoats and war as answers to domestic problems: It won’t work. And both parties offer the same policy with superficial differences of social symbolism (the culture wars) which is ironic in a country that prides itself on being free (people should be free to make these cultural symbolic choices on their own and not legislate them) while the underlying economic issues - class justice - are forever ignored - even talking about them is restricted by a corporate media who have managed to turn the language of emancipation for the average person (unions, social welfare, etc) into boogyman words.

Get your act together and start acting together. Stop trying to be perfect idealistic individuals who don’t get involved with the corrupt government because your uninvolvement just serves to make it MORE corrupt.