If everyone else's answer is like mine, why the hell do we have parties? Why shouldn't we be deciding who the top seven Presidential Candidates are, voting, then having a run-off between the top-two finishers, rather than focusing on Party PoliTRICKS?
It's time for a rant. I'm so sick of poliTRICKS being used as if it were a word, or even a witty concept. It's pure cynicism, and nothing is more lazy than cynicism. It's a self-congratulatory pat on the back for those who want to feel intellectually superior to those who work for change within the system.
We have parties to prevent travesties like Cecelia Jones being elected to represent a district she doesn't live in. If you have every fringe group forming it's own party, you end up with a coalition government that is not very stable and makes economic progress more difficult. The parties are democratic, and they change and adapt with the times. Republicans today are the party of Lincoln in name only, and Democrats are no longer the left wing liberals that once defined the party. The parties adapt to the times. They offer a balance to each other, without fragmenting the electorate to the point of producing a stagnant, do-nothing government. Parties developed out of a need for organization and structure in the legislature, they are a strength of American government when the work.
When they are broken, you get dysfunctional government. When people blindly follow one party or another, you get dysfunctional government. When you don't work within a party to make them better, to represent you -- you spin your wheels.
?Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.? Leon Trotsky
?Cynicism is intellectual dandyism? George Meredith
?What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.? Oscar Wilde
