On Partisanship

For some of you, the following will be rather familiar, as Mr. Winther has talked about this before in his lectures. I agree completely with what he said, and I give him credit for much of the following, especially the graphs (mine are poorly drawn, and I apologize).

In America, politics are party-based, or partisan. The two major parties are-you guessed it- the Republican and the Democratic parties. Now, there is nothing very special about these two parties, other than the name and the important fact that they have different platforms (for example one party believes in immigration reform and the other doesn’t, or they both believe higher taxes, or whatnot. The platform is usually contained in a document showing all the views of a particular party). You may also notice that news sources tend to stick to their parties; Fox News will hardly ever say anything negative about Republicans, and the New York Times will hardly ever say anything negative about Democrats.

It is dangerous to stick to any one party. It is not a good idea to “vote the party line”. The danger is illustrated below.

Below is your typical graph. As you can see, there are relatively few people (the blue curve) who are ultra-conservative and relatively few people who are ultra-liberal. Most people lie between those two, in moderate land.

Now say that you have two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans are conservative, falling in between ultra-conservative and moderate. The Democrats are exactly opposite, falling in between ultra-liberal and moderate.

Now, somewhere along the line, the Democrats get smart. “What if we move our line a little to the left?” That would give them more voters (red) than the Republicans and the Republicans would have trouble gaining any majority in Congress.

Well, later on, the Republicans decide to do exactly the same thing, shifting their line to the right quite a bit, stealing precious votes from the Democrats. Now, the Republicans are a lot less conservative than they used to be, and the Democrats are less liberal.

Then the Democrats move their line to the left as well, taking some more votes again.

This process continues until:

Both Democrats and Republicans are barely off the moderate center. The major parties will always “find the hump”, so if most people are conservative, then the parties will probably be conservative as well.

This explains why third parties have such a hard time getting votes. The two major parties are hogging the votes near the center, and the third parties are left with minimal population far off the center.

The danger, then, with sticking to a certain party, is that the party values will always change to benefit the party the most. We can see this going on with the Republican Party, as it gradually moves toward the liberal side. But it moves so slowly that nobody notices! We act surprised when the Republicans nominate a moderate candidate for president, but the process has been continuing for a long time!

Thus, since parties will almost never conform to our views (and even if they do, they won’t for long), we should not “vote the party line”. I propose that each person should vote according to values, not on a party basis. If a Democratic candidate conforms to your views (however unlikely that occurrence might be), then vote for him! Of course, biblical values trump personal values every time, so first ask, “Does this candidate walk in the way of the Lord?” before you ask questions like, “Does he believe in small government?”

One final note: parties will almost never change their platform if you merely beg them to do so. They want voters, not any particular person. The best way to reform parties is to move the hump. Thus, if you want conservative parties, you need conservative voters. Now, you may try to convince your friends to be conservatives, but most likely they will not listen to you. The best way to move the hump is to teach your children biblical values, so when they vote, they vote biblically. If every Christian did so, we would see a change in politics in about 30 years! We shouldn’t merely look to the short term; we need to have a long- term vision.

Summary: I do not believe in a partisan system, and I will not vote the party line. I will vote for the candidates whom I believe are the best. I also believe that we need to train up biblical voters so we can move the hump. If we do, we will see some major reforms in politics in the not-so-distant future.

What are your views?

Casey