Independent's Guide to Overthrowing the Two-Party System

by James Duncan

In 2016, for the first time ever, the well-respected Economist magazine dropped America out of its highest tier “full democracy” category and into a “flawed democracy” rank alongside many third-world countries with systemic privacy, due-process, corruption, and civil-rights concerns.

there is nothing in the Constitution that sanctions or encourages our government always being controlled by only Republican and Democrats. They’re both privately run organizations, with no public accountability to any of us, only working to benefit themselves.

In their extensive 2017 political study, Why Competition in the Politics Industry is Failing America, Harvard University determined that most of our current issues really are from having only these two political options. The authors of the 2017 political study (Gehl and Porter) explain, “It’s important to recognize that much of what constitutes today’s political system has no basis in the Constitution. As our system evolved, the parties—and a larger political industrial complex that surrounds them—established and optimized a set of rules and practices that enhanced their power and diminished our democracy.”

Princeton’s own 2014 political study concluded that the US is actually no longer even a functioning democracy. Looking at regular voters’ actual impact on policy, the Princeton study frighteningly concluded the US has already crept into the classification of being an oligarchy. They found the will of America’s voters has been almost completely superseded by a small group of wealthy business moguls entrenched with politicians. The Princeton authors (Gilens and Page) declare, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Let that sink in. America is no longer a functioning democracy, but an oligarchy. Like Russia, or arguably China or North Korea.

Just like in business, real competition to the Republicans and Democrats through independent voices and political groups, is the answer. And this competition will naturally occur, once we simply undo the steps the two parties have collectively taken to insulate themselves from it.

In its fascinating study, Monopoly Politics, FairVote.org explains, “The outcome of more than 80 percent of U.S. House races can be predicted with near certainty years ahead of the election. In 2012 and 2014 House elections, our model made “high-confidence” projections in 701 contests (80.5 percent of all races), and was correct in all but one. Two days after the 2014 elections we issued our high-confidence projections for 2016 in five of six races with 100 percent accuracy.”

So ask yourself, in a system where your vote for who is elected doesn’t matter, then those “elected” don’t take their responsibilities to the Constitution or you seriously, but instead vote with their lobbyist-dictated party 90 percent of the time, where is the democracy? Nonexistent, that’s where.

Mikey Edwards in The Parties Versus the People writes, “We Americans believe in choice. In almost every facet of our lives from soups to soaps to stereos, we expect, and demand, multiple options. How strange it is that in the area that counts far more than any of these, and that determines how much we will pay in taxes, what government services we will receive, and even whether our sons or daughters or husbands or wives will be sent off to fight and possibly die on a foreign battlefield, we allow two private organizations whose primary goal is the gaining and keeping of power to tell us on election day that we are allowed to choose only between the two people they have told us we must choose between.”

To get a deeper understanding of this core debate of federal versus state’s rights you should learn about the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798. In them, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that the states should, and already do, have the ability to nullify any unconstitutional laws made by the federal government.

The oversimplified talking points only serve to help both sides of the two parties stay in power over the long term. The reality is that we don’t need private groups (Republicans or Democrats) in charge of our elections at all, and things would drastically change for the better if the two-party system was not allowed to continue pulling the strings to our elections.

Thomas Paine said, “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” If we just accept these violations of privacy and property rights by the government it continues to set awful precedents.

There are many ideas of what artificial intelligence in government could look like, some of them pretty sci-fi compared to our current state. On one extreme, picture altruistic and brilliant robots replacing all of our loser politicians, or maybe some sort of giant mainframe dictating all of our government processes from a dark room atop a tower like the Wizard of Oz. Obviously, this type of scenario is a far ways off, and is probably the exact circumstance where we would be exterminated, once the AI logically determines we’d all be better off if there were just less of us.

Ben Franklin said, “In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.”