Every Two-Party System Has Its Silent 3rd Party.

Dan and I were talking politics the other day, while drinking and he and I rarely do that. Anyway, between us I think somebody brought up a pretty good point: our two party system works pretty well, but it does have one FLAW:

We need to have GOD,

...in our classrooms,

...PERFORMING ABORTIONS

...with a FULLY-AUTOMATIC FIREARM -

- and then getting the death penalty for it.

If we had that, I think we'd have a pretty good system, one that has all its extremes brought right back into balance with some necessary, albeit regrettably-evil, checks. Apart from that, though, the system we have works pretty well. People vote for what they'd vote for, some vote the slate (of one party's candidates), others pick and choose on issues or person or other basis.

In our legislatures, the same goes to a large extent: people vote for what they'd vote for. They've joined their party for a reason. Most of them espouse all or most, or at least, much of its platform stances, so most of the time, they'll vote those. Other times, they may disagree with this or that plank of the platform - so they vote the other way. If they're honest, then they've admitted that disagreement with that plank during their career, or during their campaign - assuming they were questioned about it, which is kind of supposed to happen with candidates for service at state and federal levels. So if they were honest about their position and got in anyway, then the will of the people simply was that they wanted a person in that position who believes in things for reasons, and who doesn't just swallow platforms whole and vote the slate.

Not a bad thing to want, if you're the will of a people.

Of course, sometimes it's not a case of disagreement with the party plank, when you vote the other way as a legislator. Sometimes you - or a bunch of you together, in strategy - decide that a trade is needed, for some bigger thing. So you decide you need to bite the bullet, and trade away, for now, a thing you want - as long as we can do so without damaging what we want later on that important score! You trade it off, in order to get that bigger thing. That thing we need even more, right now. You've preserved that other, smaller fight for the future, because you were careful to do no damage to it by what you accepted today. And that's compromise. Compromise is also a matter of conscience. Compromise is conscience with a sense of proportion.

Anyone - public servant or not - can subscribe to all, or most, or even only much of a given party platform, and still identify as this or that party. You can do this because you believe there's value in coming together, and because you find the party supports most of your core points, or you support most of its. As someone who identifies as that party - whether you are or aren't a registered member, or even if you're an elected legislator - you don't necessarily swallow the whole platform. You will criticize it, to your fellow party members or sympathizers, where you find a stance wanting. You'll work within, with like minds, to make the party a better organization as you see it. But ultimately in the meantime, you accept the planks you dislike. You that see others dislike yours, too, and you see that you all still have a great deal to gain, by coming together on most of it.

Never will a meaningful or powerful number of people come together on all of it. Let pipsqeaks, weaklings and noncomformists wail on the sidelines and "opt out," much good may it do them. And much good it does do - to wail and rail in protest, to refuse to join in any part of it, does do much good.

Yet coalitionists know the value of common cause, and so they make it. Painfully, bitterly sometimes, they make it, because they believe in a greater good that we can make together despite our points between of painful difference. Sometimes we make common cause painfully even in victory, often we make it bitterly in defeat.

A party platform is not a thing that demands a thinking, caring being to subscribe to it all, always in every case, as if it were an absolute, a fixed ideal - and the being, a slave to it. No. When a given case demands compromise, the sacrifice of immediate gain to a greater need and goal for the cause, you make that sacrifice as part of your fight for the bigger picture. And when a given case demands no compromise with conscience is possible, because you disagree too strongly with this point of the plank - you vote the other way, and for reasons you can passionately state.

Whether out of a measured, needful compromise, or real disagreement with a point, you vote your conscience. They call it bipartisanship, they call it compromise, when Rightists or Leftors cross the aisle. But really, it is simply conscience. You know that what's right in this case is not the cut-dried point-by-point stance of your party, so - painfully, perhaps; knowing you sacrifice solidarity, and that some will fault you for it - you vote what's right in this case.

The third party in any 2-party system is: your conscience, together in a coalition of all those who agree with you on what is right, on what must be done in the hard case at hand. In every 2-party system that works, there must be that third party that exists both within and across party lines. It will have different members based on different issues, and at different times. Party bloc loyalists will decry every little defection across the aisles, but party bloc loyalists are not the problem. They too are voting their consciences.

Oh, I was kidding up there, about there being a need for God to be in our classrooms performing abortions with an assault weapon. If God did that, I do believe we should try and execute God, because talk about hypocrisy.