political independents

[eirias]

Andrew Sullivan linked to a New York Times blurb showing that lots of people (esp. in the southwest) are uncomfortable with party labels these days, and that in a recent nationwide poll, a majority of respondants said they would prefer elections sans party labels. At first blush, this is interesting and maybe important -- but then I think about it and I realize I'm pretty sure that parties, labeled or no, are an emergent property of political landscapes. I have a strong suspicion that the two-party system is so entrenched here that even if we scrapped the current one, even if we abolished labels, an effectively two-party system would emerge as the new stable state within a few election cycles. I think that all that this might be signalling is disillusionment with the two current parties. What do you all think? (Bonus points for answers deeper than "Of course they're disillusioned; [party of choice] sucks!")

Comments

[blimix.livejournal.com]

(According to Noam Chomsky) The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a populist political party.

People may not understand that both major parties here are under the thumb of big business, but people might easily perceive that these parties do not represent *them*.

[feuervogel]

Populism plays really well in the South. It's too bad the neocons and televangelicals have worked everything to be around religion and Biblical Values (whatever that is), because folks in the South tend to see a more authoritarian God, and there are correlations between authoritarian religion and authoritarian government (cf Lakoff.)