by Arianna Huffington

I have good news. Our two-party system is working quite beautifully. That is, if you are a member of the small, moneyed elite using your financial clout to control both parties' agendas.

For those who don't belong to that exclusive club, however, not so much.

The evidence is everywhere you look:

Why are the too-big-to-fail banks still too big to fail? Why couldn't the overwhelmingly popular public option on health care pass? Why is there still so little emphasis on jobs in a time of 9.0 percent unemployment?

On issue after issue -- education, our crumbling infrastructure, the rising costs of health care, climate change, the steady decline of the middle class -- our current two-party system has been able to produce only what Tom Friedman rightly calls "suboptimal solutions."

It's not just that the two-party system has narrowed our choices, it's narrowed our thinking. It has enshrined and deeply internalized a cynical conventional wisdom into our political discourse -- it has deeply infected our media and our politicians. Our problems require new kinds of thinking of the sort that our system as it's currently constituted simply doesn't allow.

Instead, it forces us to see everything through the tired, limiting, obsolete and increasingly distorting prism of left vs. right. But our problems just don't fit neatly into this box anymore.

How can we possibly take the political and social dispositions of 300 million Americans and put them in just one of two containers? As John Adams, a Federalist, said centuries ago: "There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other." If only he could see how his dread has materialized - leaving Washington in a state of perpetual gridlock.

It creates deep divisions that inevitably lead our leaders to dig deeper and more fortified trenches. And this inevitably ends up putting an inordinate amount of power in the hands of the few so-called centrists who are willing to -- on rare occasions -- venture out of their trenches in search of what passes these days for compromise. We saw this played out in horrific fashion during the health care "debate" in which Democrats spent 14 months hoping to woo Olympia Snowe - like a pathetic love struck high schooler who hasn't learned to grasp that she's just not that into him.

The alternative to this bipartisan entropy is a multiparty system that increases the choices offered the public and helps ensure that the views of a variety of different interest and constituents and points of view are considered when policy is made. Multiparty systems also ensure that minority groups have a voice in the political process. And not just a voice, but actual clout.

The hunger for change is evident on both sides of the political spectrum -- from the meteoric rise to power of an outsider candidate like Obama to the lightning in a bottle creation of the tea party -- both the result of grassroots, anti-systemic movements. The American people clearly want alternatives.

On practically every level, potential nominees in each party are running away from the establishment label and desperately trying to show their independence from the establishment wings of the two parties that are held in such low esteem. This is breaking down the cohesion and control of the parties. And it can't happen soon enough.

So is the answer a modern Ross Perot -- an independent third party candidate beholden to neither party? Hardly. No one figure -- even as president -- has the power to enact the kind of change we need without also having serious legislative backup. If congressional Democrats and Republicans remain gridlocked, nothing will be accomplished.

Similarly, we can have numerous political parties, but if they are still financed and beholden to special interests, not much is going to change.

The Internet and social media are making such a state of affairs much more likely. Thanks to the Web and new media, we have an increasingly Web-savvy citizenry -- and we're seeing a generation of voters less aligned with large institutions. They're more empowered than ever to connect with each other and cut through the lies perpetrated by politicians and special interests.

If you don't believe me, just ask Hosni Mubarak -- it shouldn't be that hard, he's got lots of time on his hands. At least until he gets his own Fox News show.

In a letter to Francis Hopkinson, Thomas Jefferson said "I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."

Well, it's clear our two-party system is not taking us to heaven. In fact, it's taking us in the other direction.

 

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The Two-Party System is Making America Ungovernable | Politics

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