Political Climate
I do not care if you are a conservative, a liberal, or anything inbetween, our government sucks because of the two party system that has been around since the election. It worked out fairly well for the last 200 years… then some how it turned to shit.
It started probably in 76 with the election of Jimmy Carter. It was cool to be a Democrat, it was good to be against the Republican system. Then Carter drove the country to shit, which led to the rise of Reagan and the conservative movement. A natural backlash to the rise of the left wing that occurred in the Carter administration. The conservatives took root, they created a system of the war machine, they destroyed communism by making the communists spend themselves into oblivion. They made the business their sole focus, they made capitalism what it has become today. Their only problem was the fact that they aligned themselves with the religious nutjobs of the world. The evangelicals were now becoming part of the government. The separation of church and state was becoming blurred. They aligned themselves with the people that would come out and vote, they aligned themselves with senior citizens, they aligned themselves with the people that lived in the outskirts of the big cities. They aligned themselves with the powerful corporate types, they aligned themselves with the white majority at the time.
Then 92 rolled around and as a natural backlash, the Democrats took over once again. These were not left wing democrats, rather moderate democrats that took over the government. The conservatives were going to far to the right and it was the natural result of the pendulum going to far to one side and it needed to be brought back towards the center. The democrats lost congress due to their own ineptitude, and for the fact that a new group of people rose from the ashes of the conservative movement. The right wing radio talk show hosts that gave their programming away for free. The right wing talk show hosts aligned themselves with the image of Reagan, the last great President, invoking imagery and statements that made people feel good about themselves. They took a good term, liberal, and made it into a horrific term.
Instead of a large group of moderates, people wanted to become true conservatives, they wanted to be everything that Rush Limbaugh and his talking heads wanted them to be. They were a huge voting block that took control of the nation once again. They helped usher in the Bush era. The problem then became, they could not be the party of the 80′s. They did not have communism to fight against, they did not have an enemy, other than people that were “liberals”. Luckily for them, 9/11 happened and they had a target. Instead of terrorists being their lone target, these talk heads made this out to be a religious war of some type. They made it out to be an us versus them, it became about National Security, it became about stripping our rights away for National Security.
There is only so long that you can dangle the carrot in front of the horse and people wised up and voted them out in 06, then the Democrats took to the new medium, the internet and it helped usher Obama into the white house along with a slew of democrats. The talking heads loved it, they were not able to go on the offensive, which they were not able to really do for the 8 years under Bush, they had a new target, Obama and the Liberals.
The problem now is that there are two groups again, but these two groups are at complete opposite ends of the spectrum. They are liberals in charge of the Democratic party and once again, everyone is trying to be more conservative than anyone else on the Republican party. The sad fact is that a majority of the Democrats are probably moderate, but with Pelosi running the show, they are far too left wing.
I fear for this country, it is like having too many people at the fringe of society making decisions to do things and nobody is willing to budge towards the center to get anything done. It has gotten to the point where Conservatives are trying to tag other conservatives as being too liberal and trying to run them out of office. The moderates use to be the middle class of government, now the middle class is shrinking and nothing is getting done.
If you are a pro choice person, but also like tax breaks and small government, you have no choices when you go to vote. When you are a person that cares about homosexual rights, but do not want big government, where do you vote? Every person that you have voted for since 1976 has probably been a lesser evil than the other guy.
Our government is going down a path that it may never recover from. People trying to out do the other by being more of something that really does not exist. I hate the entire process and it makes me sick every time I watch the news, or see political ads, there is nobody in congress that I would re-elect right now, there is nobody in the Democratic party nor the Republican party that I would vote for happily. Nobody in either party stands up for me any longer, they stand up for their party and their parties views. Neither of the parties stand up for me.
