The Pitfalls of a Political Duopoly

I follow almost 400 feeds on Twitter. While I usually don’t see every tweet from every feed, there are some that I am sure to look out for. One of those is Big Think, which often tweets links to articles on their site. These articles aren’t usually very long, so you can quickly digest the gist of it. I like it because it’s a great way of keeping abreast of different information and if you find that information intriguing, you can dive further into it.

This afternoon, I saw a this tweet:

Larry Lessig: End Raging Cronyism, Save Our Republic | Think Tank | Big Think ow.ly/f0oAV

— Big Think (@bigthink) November 4, 2012

I’ve heard Larry Lessig speak — he makes quite a compelling argument. The content of this post wasn’t anything I hadn’t already heard from him, but I scrolled down to the comments to see what people had to say. (That’s another benefit to Big Think: the commenters usually contribute something useful to the discussion.) There was one comment that I thought was particularly interesting. I’m not quite sure of my opinion, but I think it’s worth sharing with all of you. I invite you to leave your thoughts on the comment with a comment of your own below:

Well no wonder we keep failing to attain real change.  Lets ignore statistically verified and observable reality and hope and love our way to a solution?  Contrary to what telenovellas like to tell us, when doctors say there is nothing that can be done for a patient, they are usually right, not always I admit but almost always.

So what equivalent of spontaneous recovery are we going to hope for with our crooked political and economic system?  Are captains of industry going to suddenly develop social consciousness?  Perhaps the rich and powerful will all suddenly get plagues and die?  Mr. Lessig isn’t really offering us a realistic solution, in fact he is only offering us yet another of the many accurate analyses of what is wrong with our system in the hope that we hope our way to a better one.

What Mr. Lessig isn’t acknowledging is that the Supreme Court was right, we do have the ultimate say, still, as the people, in who gets elected.  There were nineteen candidates for President on my ballot this year an admitted decrease from the twenty-seven I had in 2008, but still a lot of possibilities and I know for a fact that at least fifteen of them and as many as seventeen of those nineteen candidates weren’t in the corrupt hands of the monied interests.  Some of my other choices were more limited only three to five candidates for Congress, and the State Legislature (both houses), again with a few candidates I knew to be free of the monied corruption of the major parties.  And you know what!?  When I voted for those candidates, there were no earthquakes, or tornadoes or locusts or men in black at my house punishing me for making those choices.  Duvurgers law isn’t a natural law like gravity or evolution, we need not confine ourselves to political duopoly and coercion by monied interests through strategic voting.  We do have the ultimate say, and if you confine yourself to not voting, or to only voting strategically, than you are demonstrating that perhaps you aren’t ready for real democracy.  The “aristocracy” only has power because we collectively let them have it, if the best answer you can come up with for overthrowing that power is to hope it away…. well then I would just as soon let them continue to be in charge, because your input is certainly not going to lead to a prosperous beneficial society.