How did it come to this? How the whole country did slowly and gradually, step by step, turned into direction that seemed unfeasible and unrealistically detrimental even fifty years ago? The answer is fairly simple if you can analyze patterns.
Politicians, in mass, are liable to all defects of other humans - including greed and addiction to power. This is a very interesting case of addiction, interesting in that it has no limits. Food, water, sex, alcohol, traditional narcotics - all those cravings have a cutoff point, but not the power. Otherwise there would be no wars as wars are always provoked or started by people who already possess much power but aspire for more. There is no hope that official medical science would any time soon investigate power as extremely powerful and interesting narcotic: subjects for this research would reside among top elite of the world, which makes making them available for research a losing proposition from get go. I don't mean to spread this notion over all politicians, just like I wouldn't suggest that all people without exception are prone to flu or alcoholism. More so: every once in a while a special group of people, unselfish and immune to the disease - at least temporarily, perhaps - break the ice to the top and leaves a mark and, being able to recognize the dangers of the narcotic, hands down adequate protocol to guide their contemporaries and their children into the future. Founding fathers might've been one such group. Some of the rules stated by the Constitution clearly indicate that they had very little faith in personal impeccability of the politicians of the future, and rightfully so. Politicians may not run their numbers in millions, yet they still make a statistically valid sample to not put much confidence in their joint excellence.
Now, combine this observation with another one: the more country leans to the left, the more power it gives to those in control, and draw your own conclusions. Mine is this: Reps or Dems, right or left - give them time, and they will jointly move left as a mass. With only two parties being in the picture for years and years, with no healthy competition on horizon, there is no doubt that the whole country will be shifting left until the dead end, and most of you old-timer folks have been witnessing this for decades. I have noticed enough of "Reps are not the same party they used to be" to deem this as an accurate forecast of things to come; I kinda envision the observation "Reps are now approximately what Dems were a decade ago" coming around every decade or so. I also envision bunch of other things, most of them not pleasant: further distribution of wealth from middle class to welfare recipients to the point of leveling them up as it's close to happening in Europe, infringing on personal freedoms, protecting US workers through non-economical means and consequently losing markets due to increased costs of production, gradually losing edge in international food chain, and last but not least - engaging in more wars to cover up the mess and make ends meet.
One thing that may stop this process is, as it is both in business and in politics, engagement of healthy and less predictable competition. And what's stopping it is that notion shared by most Americans that a vote given to a small party is a wasted vote. And that's where I firmly believe that most Americans are dead wrong, particularly in current situation of country being approximately evenly divided. And here is why.
Mathematically speaking, there are only two options: your vote either makes difference, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, there is no harm in wasting it anyway, but if it does... especially when joined with few thousand votes of your confederates... That immediately puts your party, no matter how small, on the map and makes it a highly sought after absorption target for a party with closest platform. Simple example in case: Remember Florida 2000? If 1% of Reps indicated their intention to vote Libertarian, we just might have had a Libertarian in the Cabinet today.
Practices of parties joining and consolidating based on results of polls, politicians exiting races and giving their votes to other politicians in exchange for positions in government, were around for just about as long as electoral games were around. It's an old and blessed tradition which fades into oblivion for exactly this reason: because somehow this notion of unpopular vote being a wasted vote spreads further and further into general US public. In all this excitement we forget that unlike a business, a political party can't make its way into mainstream by running 24/7 commercials on popular channels, and really, making a party tactically sound is a two way street.
A natural question would be: what if they wouldn't join even if coalition is essential to secure a victory? Wouldn't it be a wasted vote then? Surely, stranger things happened in history. One good example is Germany of 1932 - when Communists and Social-Democrats wouldn't unite and thus left Nazi victorious. But this was a very special case, with Communists being fully controlled by USSR and the order not to unite handed down to them directly from Moscow to pursue some veiled goals which are outside of the scope of this discussion. Apart from that... I'd say that a party as inflexible as unable to compromises doesn't deserve to win anyway, and is certainly not a true representative of majority vote - as simple as that. Let the other side have it. It will still come to that, only approximately a decade later...
I'm not associated with a party, and not promoting a particular platform. Just trying to share what seems like common sense about elections in general. I guess the bottom-line is this: by voting for lesser of two evils, you only slightly delay the greater evil - as it will come down to it still, and sooner than you may expect. At this point, US public would be doing much greater service to itself by voting for what they truly believe in as opposed to the closest popular choice, and let the politicians sort it out through mergers. It's a paradigm change, but it better happen. Do people need to be lured to this idea as beneficial and possibly necessary? Sure.
But hey, I'm doing my part by writing this post
Best regards to all.
Maybe we could talk Zell Miller into making a run for it.
