The U.S. Needs Two Healthier Main Parties

My Election 2022 Message

The television ads say that democracy in the USA is on the ballot on Tuesday. But what they don't say is that these ads are futile because about 40% of Americans don't vote based on civil or moral issues. Let’s take a minute to think about the implications.

Four in ten Americans vote based on their wallets: are they richer and more financially confident than they were a few years ago? And they don't decide the answer to this question based on rational analysis of policy. They vote based merely on tribal allegiance (partisans) or on throwing the out-of-power party out (independents).

These sorry facts now have now walked the USA to the edge of a perilous cliff. Voters are more likely than not to reward the GOP and neuter the President's agenda. This is a unique, unprecedented problem because the GOP has transformed itself in recent years into an amoral bunch of cowardly leaders who coddle election deniers, embrace conspiracy theories, and are willing to seize power by nearly any means necessary (with a few notable exceptions like Liz Cheney).

If you're paying attention, you know this already. You also are (hopefully) voting for the Democratic candidate who will strike a blow against this aggression against democracy. If you aren’t voting for a Democrat because they’ve swerved too far to the left, I’ll have a few words for you in a moment.

What I hope you will realize is that--regardless of what the election brings--America is not almost certainly going to veer from the see-saw of a power play of two dominant parties. Until that changes, the only way to save democracy is to ensure that the country has the healthiest, most rational, most culturally intelligent two parties that are possible.

So, since the Democrats are already pretty sane, rational, and enlightened relative to the Republicans, the focus of democracy-lovers may very well need to be on straightening out the party that most needs reformation. Our nation's cultural intelligence needs to integrate the valid values and true arguments of conservatives in order to progress forward. Healthy, rational, and intelligent voters exist on both side of the aisle, and the future of democracy depends on them finding each other and cooperating for the sake of good governance.

The anger and hostility of blue voter towards the red voter needs to be transmuted into passion and compassion to hear out the voters who feel left behind and who are so desperate they are willing to throw democracy into the ditch. We can't give up on making a decisive difference. Vote like democracy depends on it.

Perhaps you, like substack conservative Andrew Sullivan, have voted for Democrats in the past, but you’re afraid they’re too far left these days. Sullivan wrote two days ago:

I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

I’ve counted on Andrew for years as two scoops of raisins in my cereal bowl (with an occasional rock in the spoonful). So what he says doesn’t surprise me too much, despite the fact that he has been one of the foremost journalists to warn of the dangers of creeping totalitarianism arriving with this bunch of Republican elected officials.

However, I can’t figure out how he doesn’t understand that he’s not only sending the Dems a message by voting in the semi-fascists, he’s sending the Repubs a message, too. He’s telling them to keep getting stupider, more extreme, and bolder in their worshipful obsequiousness to Donald Trump. That is a helluva wrong-headed message.

Perhaps I would vote as he will if I thought, as he seems to, that the progressives have been too successful so far in realizing a far left agenda. In fact, the vast majority of the policies implemented during the Biden agenda have been watered-down, moderate policies (or, in the case of COVID relief, somewhat excessive spending measures which had a bit of bipartisan support). Crime has gone up, but mostly (I say) because of the pandemic and the unaffordability of living, not because the Dems want to lower mandatory sentences for certain crimes or experiment with a few new ideas in addiction treatment.

I could go on about the myriad ways that the Dems aren’t as bad as Sullivan seems to think they are, but I won’t. The truth is, I think his basic premise is correct. The Dems have overreached with the progressivism in many ways. They have sided with the most extreme progressive activists when they should have been paying attention to the center-left politicians who kept warning them that they were losing credibility. They made economic mistakes that made inflation worse.

And, despite what I said a moment ago, they aren’t totally blameless when it comes to the increase in crime and illegal border crossings. They coddled the defund-the-police progressives and allowed neighborhoods like Capitol Hill in Seattle to become autonomous zones by anarchists. They hugged the most left wing voices on immigration when they should have hewed to the center. They let crisis upon crisis pile up and often didn’t look like the competent, good governance, adults-in-the-room politicians we thought we elected.

Whether you vote for the Repubs to send a message of repudiation to the Dems or vote for the Dems to send a message of repudiation to the Reps (as I will do), stop and think. Third party choices, from where I stand, are unelectable and typically abysmal. Let it sink in that the red and the blue choices are the best we can hope for in 2022, which is a terrible state.

Unless we co-create a healthier democratic system and two healthier frontrunning red and blue parties, then the cycle continues. Don’t think mundane purple moderation. Think an up-leveled violet and ultraviolet radiance on the Spiral of Cultural Intelligence. An integral approach to politics, one that respects different voices and finds common ground based on What’s Best for Everyone, might do better.