Arlen Spector and the Two-Party System

The big political news of the last few days is the switch of Senator Arlen Spector from a Republican to a Democrat. The reason why this is so important is that it gives the democrats 60 votes in the Senate (baring the ongoing recount in the Minnesota senate race). This of course gives the Democrats the power to break a filibuster, and more easily get their legislation passed.

Indeed, this continues to signify the shift in American politics and perhaps the public to the left. However, our country has created such a dichotomy of Democrat and Republican or Liberal and Conservative that the shift just goes back and forth. After 8 years of clear policy failures we are seeing the cycle shift back to the left. This cycle seems to me to be a function of an educated majority. Let's face it, we don't really have the best education system in the world. In fact, it's quite inefficient. While our children are not being effectively taught math or science, we have also neglected to provide them with a real and honest education in history, civics, and economics.

Our lack of history allows for the public to easily get swept up with war rhetoric, our lack of economic education allows for an uneducated mass of people scratching their heads at a very complex but important economic crisis. Finally, the lack of civics has allowed us to continue to elect incompetent and corrupted leaders from the same two ruling parties.

Now this may be a generalization, but there is something fundamentally wrong with a two party system, especially when the public is so uneducated and apathetic toward the process. One of the biggest issues is local and congressional elections. In 2006 80,975,537 people cast their votes for the mid-term elections. The number of people eligible to vote was nearly 220,000,000 people (and the voter turnout that year was good relative to recent congressional elections before it). This means that well over half of the eligible population does not vote for our lawmakers, and an even smaller amount actually voted for the person who is suppose to represent a large portion of the public.

So here we are with a Republican switching to become a Democrat and most of the country doesn’t care. Why? Is it because they are lazy and apathetic? Many certainly are, but the majority of the people are just not educated very well. Many see two parties that do not realistically relate to most working class people. Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally the same, with small deviations on certain issues. Neither party represents or even tries to carry out the will of the people. Yet, these people remain in our government mostly through an ever-exhausting tradition.

The election of Obama put a lot of faith in the Democratic Party. In the end, as we are already seeing, the message of hope and change was a fabulous marketing strategy by the Democratics. To give credit to Obama, he has not deviated from his campaign. The issues that were discussed (although very rarely during the campaign), have been addressed consistently. The problem here is that elections are never about the issues because both candidates seldom have the same ideas as the majority of the public. The problem is that the majority of Americans want to fully leave Iraq (as oppose to keeping “non-combat” troops), they want the government to look into a single-payer health care system, most want the Bush administration to be brought to justice for torture. They want better education, more regulation and to address climate change. And the list goes on. The problem here is that many think that the president is the one to look to in order to carry out these initiatives. People need to have a better understanding of the democratic-republican process, and to make informative votes for congress. I don’t mean to suggest that voting is the main answer, in fact I think voting is somewhat useless in a two party system, but the two party system is not permanently embedded into the legal structure of the country. We do have the ability to create more parties; it will just take a deeper grassroots effort. We saw a huge grassroots effort with Obama, but once most of those people realize how Democrats and Republicans are all part of a very similar agenda, they will hopefully put their efforts towards real change in American politics.