WHAT HAS THE PARTY DONE FOR YOU?

CAN YOU ANSWER THAT?
WHAT HAS THE PARTY DONE FOR YOU?
Why have a two-party system?
That was the question in an online forum just yesterday....and the day before, and the day before that.
Since I abhor the very mention of political party, since it sets me off for anyone to attempt to place ME in one, I began to seriously ponder that question. WHY INDEED?
WHAT HAS THE PARTY ACTUALLY DONE FOR "AVERAGE CITIZEN" AND WHY DO SO MANY AGREE WITH EITHER PARTY WHEN THEY BENEFIT SO LITTLE FROM THE AFFILIATION?

Is it as one forum member from the UK said?
"'The only real advantage is that it appeals to Americans' diminished attention spans. More than two parties will just confuse them, and result in them not even bothering to vote(in greater numbers than this is already true). Americans don't like to think too much. They just want to pick a team, and then move on. Forcing them to follow actual politics with real options would just hurt their heads.'"

Well, I wondered, do Americans really understand what their party's PLATFORM is, do they know what they're signing up for, what they're agreeing to when they call themselves these names?
So, I went to each party's pages and read. SURELY, NO ONE CAN AGREE WITH ALL OF ANY PARTY'S PLATFORM! SAY IT AIN'T SO!
HAVE YOU READ THESE?
I was truly bowled-over!
Go read, do, please!
You have NO idea, surely, surely not!

The Libertarian Platform:http://www.lp.org/platform

The GOP (Republican) Platform: http://www.gop.com/2012-republican-platform_home/

The Democrat Platform: http://www.democrats.org/democratic-national-platform

Did you go read? CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT? CAN YOU HONESTLY SAY, DEMOCRAT,  REPUBLICAN, OR LIBERTARIAN, THAT YOU HONESTLY AGREE WITH ANY OF THOSE 100%???
100%???
REALLY???

So then I wanted to know what happened to make cognizant adults want to align themselves in such a manner , what benefits John Q. Citizen might expect from such allignment...
WHY JOIN???
AND ALSO, WHO DID THIS TO AMERICA? WHO DO WE HANG FOR IT?

Political parties emerged very early in America's formative years, when James Madison and Thomas Jefferson sought to develop a political opposition to Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and the Federalist heirs of George Washington. Madison, perhaps more than the others, feared for the future of federalism and the separation of powers if Hamilton's "economic nationalism" was left unchecked. The Madison who helped frame our Constitution deeply disliked parties and factions, but a 'second Madison' had no trouble embracing them in order to save his intended institutional design. The party system that he helped launch evolved, thanks greatly to the genius of Martin Van Buren, into a contest between two large confederations of state and local parties. By a series of strong, subtle maneuvers, the parties won the political loyalties of voters scattered across a vast geographic expanse. America was destined to be divided forever.
What many fail to realize is that the party system and 'institutions' of same were never well-suited for strong, positive government. The party system FRACTURED constitutional government!
Parties were ONLY good for chest-thumping participation and office-seeking, but not for macroeconomic management or for competent  delivery of social benefits to the general populace.
NOBODY BENEFITED FROM ANY PARTY EXCEPT POLITICIANS!

Political parties have forced us all into what is called the "prisoner's dilemma."
Wikipedia offers a simple example of this:
<<The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example that shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so.
EXAMPLE:
    Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail.

You see,  collaboration is dominated by betrayal; if the other prisoner chooses to stay silent, then betraying them gives a better reward (no sentence instead of one year), and if the other prisoner chooses to betray then betraying them also gives a better reward (two years instead of three). Because betrayal always rewards more than cooperation, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them both to betray each other. The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads the prisoners to both betray, but they would get a better reward if they both cooperated. In reality, humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much more so than predicted by a theory based only on rational self-interested action.
In casual usage, the label "prisoner's dilemma" may be applied to situations not strictly matching the formal criteria of the classic or iterative games: for instance, those in which two entities could gain important benefits from cooperating or suffer from the failure to do so, but find it merely difficult or expensive, not necessarily impossible, to coordinate their activities to achieve cooperation.>>

THAT'S WHERE WE ARE, THAT'S US, THAT'S THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM!!!

F.D.Roosevelt basically eliminated the need for political parties, and a lot of other things, when he built a government designed to run a welfare state. In doing so, he changed the Constitutional balance that had been supported BY the ORIGINAL parties since the time of Madison, Jackson, and Van Buren. No president since FDR has been able to reverse this 'legacy'.

FDR was the first president who apparently realized the failings of 'the party' and determined to cope with the poor fit between the 'institutional' forms and 'executive tasks'. He, or someone close to him, well understood the limits of the party system, and decided to do something about them. That didn't last long! His ill-fated 1938 "Roosevelt purge" in which New Deal liberals were encouraged to run against reactionary and conservative Democratic incumbents in Congress in a frenzied attempt to transform his party into a programmed, responsible organization failed miserably, and FDR didn't try that again. Instead he pushed for the independent 'regulatory' commissions, the new bureaucracies, he began court-packing, and brought online the executive reorganization that he (or congressional liberals?) had already quietly launched or had planned before the failed purge effort. Roosevelt, or his 'advisers', realized that he could, and probably should, soft-pedal his revised party, THE party, as an instrument of executive governance, but it was too loaded with southern conservatives What to do, what to do? Make it all a moot point! Who needs it? We have a welfare state! The populace is in federal control, whether they vote or don't!
When I said that FDR virtually eliminated the REALITY of the parties, what actually happened was that he simply reduced voter involvement, made them just not care anymore. Some voters saw the power of the machine he'd created and began to back away from getting involved. Anyone who can create a welfare state is a force to be reckoned with, and few "reckoned'! Others were so overjoyed that the federal government would now and forever "TAKE CARE OF THEM" that they no longer saw a need to vote.
As Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon perfected FDR's 'New Deal' form of governance, they did so riding gleefully on the backs of 'social movements', on political professors and 'experts' who explained to us poor dumb sheep what we should think and accept, and they brought in a whole new breed of government executives and lawyers. Their mission was NEVER to restore life to the remnants of local, GRASSROOTS politics, and certainly was not about reforming the "conservative" parties and party factions which they abhorred. No, no, they made the same choice Roosevelt did. Rev up the newly created federal welfare state! Government was centralized, expanded, given powers few might have imagined in 1777. Fewer and fewer went to the polls to protest any of that.  BOTH parties seemed to merge into one theme...
'WE WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU, GO BACK TO SLEEP!'
Mission accomplished! The decentralized system of confederated parties, perhaps nobly imagined by Madison and perfected by Van Buren, collapsed, as one county/ward committee after another (except stubborn Chicago) died on the liberal vine. These local institutions were the vital foundation of voter involvement; without them voter involvement, voter turnout, voters daring to imagine they could change things, began a long, steady decline.

Weren't 'political scientists' alarmed by such developments? Didn't anyone kick and scream about all this?  A few. Most just shrugged and said "So what? So the local committees are gone? Who cares?" The majority argued that the 'forms' of parties were bound to change. One such political scientist, Aldrich, even said, "The major political party is the creature of the politicians... politicians do not have partisan goals per se, and the party is only the instrument for achieving them." In other words, POLITICIANS, NOT VOTERS run the parties, and THEY will change the parties in ways that insure the parties help THEM to be WINNING politicians, even if that means fence-straddling and blurring PARTY dogma.

Let's compare two of these "party systems": the one born in the North during the 1820s and 1830s which lasted until the Civil War, and the more familiar modern-day two-party system that has been our lot since the 1960s. The first was used very well to mobilize voters to go out to vote, and did indeed generate a sharp increase in voter turnout until it reached absolutely extraordinarily high levels. This was also a period of what we might call "team parties," in which politicians subordinated themselves and their individual identities to the corporate identity of their party since the path to power lay through making that trade-off. They'd accept the party platform, swear to uphold it, bow to the voters, and get elected based on that. It was all about the will of the people, and getting them to will you!
Today's parties, in great contrast to that, are merely SERVICE-PROVIDING CONGLOMERATES. They have become a FRANCHISE for entrepreneurs. The individual candidates of the two major parties meet certain requirements related, often quite loosely, to party ideology, but, out on the campaign trail, they act as freelance marketeers. They have no problem becoming highly competitive teams within the government, and this is particularly true within the House of Representatives. There's one MAJOR problem with that...they don't cooperate with each other to rally voters. No, no, no, too much COMPETITION, too much need to upstage, out-perform the 'competition', even within their own party! Top dog gets the big bones...wins the election, so it really behooves them to hope for LESS voter turnout for the competitors! Stimulating turnout is strictly up to an individual candidate's 'machine',  however he or she chooses to run it.
The basic idea has become, sadly for voters, that parties now compete in a broad marketplace of service providers for the politically ambitious. Who best SERVES their cause, THEIRS, NOT OURS, is the way the NEW party thinks. Which SERVICES can they buy, or lure, to make sure they win?  Now, access to office and influence depends on primaries, referendums, campaign finance regulation, and a privately operated system of broadcast communications. Each politician assesses these and then begins the push for MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, BECAUSE POLITICAL OFFICE CAN BE PURCHASED NOW, CAN BE BOUGHT IF YOU HIRE THE RIGHT SERVICES TO GET YOU ELECTED!
The LOSER in this shift toward a competitive market of political techniques is US, you and me, the voting citizens. GONE is the need of the would-be candidates to convince the voters, face-to-face, that they will follow the wishes of the PEOPLE, that they will actually WORK FOR the voters. Politicians no longer need to pay attention to the man on the street, to the 'little people', because the little people will not FINANCE their mega-campaigns, they won't toss nearly enough money in the pots to buy TV ads, or stage costly rallies, or drum up more contributors, or SERVE the politicians in such a way as to insure victory.
No, getting involved in politics is up to them, these little people, and if they do not have the MONEY, NAME, or time to devote to SERVE the party, NO ONE will ask them. WHO CARES? The political MACHINES, the CAMPAIGN FINANCE COMMITTEE/SERVICE PROVIDERS don't come from John Q. Public, no! The new politicians play to those who can CONTRIBUTE the most! Spending the 'war chests' to motivate the ALREADY motivated voters is cost-effective. It is NOT cost-effective to pursue those who are not listed in the databases of the party's political machine, the SERVICE PROVIDERS, the REAL 'electorate'.
You see, politicians KNOW that less than half of the REGISTERED voters will likely turn out to vote. They also realize how many are NOT registered! They don't need YOU, little people, they have the ones who stand to gain the most by their election! They know that those who FINANCE the most will GET the most in return, and they know that YOU, the little people, ,will neither expect much nor give much, so you're out of the loop! Who needs you?
The 50% or less, usually less, who are going to the polls are going to INVEST the most for a RETURN on what they PAID FOR.
Fortunes are spent on electoral politics and politicians employ all the latest campaign techniques, propaganda, advertising maneuvers, pull every rabbit out of every hat to get elected, BUT we STILL do not get much average-voter turnout in return because they've eliminated the need for the little people, for those who are actually the MAJORITY, those who just DON'T VOTE.
Look at the last 2 elections...I thought the GOP would die of apoplexy because so many from the opposing party got out to vote! They cried foul, they had live, on-TV seizures, they swore it was voter fraud...WHY? Because those whom they'd IGNORED for so long decided that they'd go vote...the NON-contributors, the little people who can't afford a $1000 a plate campaign dinner.
What was the lesson these seat-buying, war-chest toting marketeers of lies and false campaign promises can learn from this?
NEVER COUNT THE LITTLE PEOPLE OUT! NEVER THINK THE AVERAGE CITIZEN IS NEVER GOING TO VOTE! THE NON-VOTING MAJORITY CAN BECOME THE VOTING MAJORITY ON ONE FINE DAY IN NOVEMBER AND KICK YOU SORRY BUTTS OUT, NO MATTER WHICH PARTY YOU ARE!

During the "golden age" of party politics, from 1830 to 1890, we had something approaching a genuine participatory democracy in this country. The grassroots movements moved mountains. The man on the street, the poor and the rich, was the target of all politicians who NEEDED them to win. There were no mega-machines of parties back then, no TV ads, no fake TV promises.
Today we have, instead of the need for ALL to vote, a vast jumble of professionally managed "activation of supporters," that is, the stimulation and enlistment of thousands of subsets of the PREFERRED citizenry in SERVICE to the ambition of an interest group or a candidate. Several kinds of professional consulting firms are available to the well-heeled or well-organized to accomplish their preferred strategy of activation: pollsters, media consultants, fundraisers, gatherers of demographic data, opposition and issue researchers, speechwriters, schedulers, psychologists, ad men, etc.
This is NOT for the 'little people'...this is for the MONIED who can FINANCE THE PURCHASE OF POLITICAL OFFICE!!!
PARTIES EXIST NOW TO BUY OFFICES.
PARTIES EXIST NOW TO BUY OFFICES.
PARTIES EXIST NOW TO BUY OFFICES.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT PARTIES EXIST NOW TO BUY OFFICES?
WHAT HAS THE PARTY DONE FOR YOU?
IT'S MADE YOU OBSOLETE!
THEY DON'T NEED YOUR VOTE, JUST YOUR MONEY TO BUY THE VOTES OF THOSE WHO ALWAYS VOTE BECAUSE THE MONIED DERIVE THE MOST BENEFIT ONCE THEIR GUY IS ELECTED!
WHAT HAS THE PARTY DONE FOR YOU?
LOOK AROUND!
IF YOU THINK ANY ONE PARTY HAS MADE THIS MESS, YOU ARE MOST DESERVING OF THE MESS!
THE PARTIES, BOTH OF THEM HAVE SOLD YOU DOWN THE RIVER...YOU CAN FLOAT ON, OR YOU CAN FIGHT YOUR WAY TO SHORE AND GO PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE FOR THE DUNKING, FOR ALMOST DROWNING YOU IN THIS OCEAN OF DEBT AND MISMANAGEMENT, FOR LYING TO YOU, FOR TAKING AWAY YOUR CIVIL LIBERTIES!
PARTIES EXIST NOW TO BUY OFFICES.
WHAT HAS THE PARTY DONE FOR YOU?