With politics on my mind, it occurred to me that we use the term two-party system loosely in this country, and it bothers me.
We have two parties that switch roles over time, and have no real institutional continuity. They make hard issues easy for people without a lot of time to hand over power to less than 500 people that officially run the US. It isn’t great, and I wouldn’t even say it is good. It is what has led me to become uninvolved in most politics.
I am registered with the Green Party, because on paper I agree with most of their stated goals. I don’t actually know any one in the Green Party, though, so they could be a bunch of wonks. I’ve never been to one of their websites and thought they were doing webcraft correctly, so there is that.
The important part of me is that so-called “independent” or “third-party” groups get to participate in governing. Neither the Tea Party nor the Occupy movement were able to penetrate this system, so I think it is mostly hopeless. Perhaps Pope Benedict will inspire the parties to start employing system 2 thinking and evict themselves from power.