Well, my first thought is that when George Washington warned, at the end of his presidency, that we should avoid political parties, he proved himself so incredibly prescient it makes me wonder if he was privy to a crystal ball. Both parties have gone too far supporting the rise of corporatocracy in America. If your state has open primaries, meaning you can vote in the primary election no matter what your party affiliation, I would definitely register as an independent. But if they have a closed primary, beaning only voters registered in a given party can vote in that party’s primary, then here are the fundamental differences between the only two that currently have much chance of winning on a national stage.
I’m not sure how you avoid partisan politics, but it is a grevious curse on national unity today. Watching the foolishness unfolding in Wisconsin right now, with the Republican Senate finding the Democrats in contempt for leaving the state, and then when they realized they don’t have the Constitutional authority to send State Troopers out to arrest them, thinking of hiring Dog the Bounty Hunter or some such. Our politics have come to a point of divisiveness I haven’t seen since Massive Resistance in the South after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954.
Ever since the Civil War, the South had voted as a monolithic block for one of the two political parties. Blaming Republicans like Abe Lincoln for their grief rather than their own attack on Fort Sumter, they were solidly Democratic for 100 years. They had a special brand of Democrats called Diexcrats who were fiscally conservative, favored the wealthy landed gentry over the poor, and supported segregating and apartheid. They were largely against any sort of move toward equality, whether it involved women, racial equality or the GLBT community.
When President Johnson sent federal troops into Selma in 1965 to enforce the Civil Rights Act, the Republicans, long languishing as a smaller party representing the corporate elite and the rich, saw an opportunity to make a deal with the racist devil they had always opposed. They appealed to the Dixiecrats to cross party lines, and we soon had the solidly red South. That split the South away from the Democratic Party, which had always been the representative of the working class in America, meaning most of the electorate.
At the same time, we also saw a transition in Republican strategy. Nothing will likely ever change the real party interest, supporting global mega wealth. That is where the bulk of their election funding comes from. But the problem the party always faced is that less than 2% of the US population is wealthy enough to benefit from that agenda over the long haul. You need over 50% to win elections. So the GOP crafted a strategy of appealing to values voters on every issue where emotions ran so strong that simply reaching out to those voters would ensure allegiance.
Republicans became the party of the Religious Right and Racism, which played beautifully in the South. They appealed to anti-gay prejudice, which resonated across most of the nation in the 1960s. The majority is straight. They went after the gun lovers. They went after tax hatters. Wow, lots of those. But the real purpose of the talking points turned out by right-wing think tanks is always the same. Support the interests of the billionaire corporatists who fund Republican Party and the right-wing think tanks..
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