A Failing Democracy

Matt Taibbi’s article this past Friday published on Rolling Stone’s website strikes a resoundingly true note. He comments, not at all briefly, on how it’s quite ridiculous that Mitt Romney ever stood a chance at winning this election. He proposed the idea that the current split of the electorate among the two candidates makes absolutely no sense, given what the two major candidates represent. He also goes on to suggest that any candidate really and truly different from the two from our bipartisan system would clean house, with a true landslide victory. I have to say: I agree with him completely. So then why do we not see this?

For the grand majority of our country’s history, we have seen the federal government run by a bipartisan system that has attempted to maintain its position of power. Referring back to class (or was it recitation?) on the 26th, the system was designed to keep newcomers out of power: and we've seen a huge increase in the size of the obstacle newcomers now face. Candidates like Jill Stein, who truly differs from Mitt Romney in almost all areas of policy, has no real shot at even garnering a small percentage of the popular vote, much less the vote of a single member of the electoral college, and while this might seem like a small problem in the face of our ever-impending economic “apocalypse”, how could it be any less important?

This bipartisan system that’s firmly latched itself to seats of power throughout the 50 states of the union has slowly been sucking the life from this country. We have seen nearly no major differences between the two major party candidates in decades, and without some serious change, we won’t for the foreseeable future. Yet the vast majority of the American populace seems not to care, they seem content to sit back and be ruled by parties who would as soon toss them under the boss as toss them a bone, and this really, truly weakens our democracy.

We were founded as a nation governed “by the people, for the people.” In a true democracy, we could easily kick out these impostors  and rid ourselves of this vampiric parasite that is slowly killing our democratic republic. Unfortunately, it will take the actions of a lot of people who cannot seem to agree on the simplest of things to rise up and act, and the dispelling of many of the rumors spread by the stenographic media we now rely on for our information. Make no mistake: this can and will happen… eventually. It simply remains a question of how long, and how much of our freedom will we have to lose before we rebel?