Politics! The Blogpost!

I've been thinking about our political system ever since I heard one of the songs in the new musical, Caucus.

You really just can't make this shit up.

Anyway, I was thinking about the problem that most people have with our political system, which is, of course, everything. So let's narrow it down a little to the electoral process.

Most people seem to fall into one of two camps: Either they feel that it is every citizen's patriotic duty to vote in an informed, reasonable matter, or they feel that their own vote is just one drop in an ocean, except it doesn't matter quite as much.

So should you vote in an informed manner, or should you just stay home? Me, I say, vote according to your party lines without thinking about it.

Here's my thinking: You don't want a small group of informed people voting for everyone else; that's an oligarchy. (Yes, I know; that's also Congress, but read on and then let me know if you have any better ideas.) So you want the vote open to a lot of people.

But you also don't want all those people to vote so many different ways that, statistically, the last place candidate did about as well as the winner. That's a pretty random distribution, and that doesn't reflect the will of the people. So you want to polarize votes into a small number of groups: political parties.

Then, you invent a bunch of "controversies" and pretend that they actually affect the lives of the voters, so that they will care deeply about their parties and supply votes without thinking too much about it. That way, the votes by one large, unthinking mass are balanced out pretty well by the votes from the other large, unthinking mass(es). This means that, for the most part, peoples' votes don't matter, but those people don't think about politics, so they don't care. The very few people who DO care will then have a disproportionately large amount of power to sway elections one way or another, but those people (by definition) care about the issues that actually affect them, and so they will vote intelligently. That, my friend, is democracy.

At least, if I wanted to subjugate a large populace without having to worry too much about uprisings, rebellions and coups, that's how I'd go about it.