On this July 4th, I'm reading a book written by Peter Mair called Ruling the Void. In it Mair lays out the reality of our political predicament. Political parties have become detached from their constituencies resulting in far less partisan politics and more out of touch politicians. This results in increased voter apathy and erratic election results.

For what it's worth, the founders of this country were adamently opposed to political parties. George Washington spent most of his farewell address denouncing political parties and begging people to not create them. So this country wasn't built around there being political parties - two or otherise. Political parties formed in spite of the wishes of the founders of the country, but surely they must have known people would group together to be stronger politically.

In his book, Mair focuses on Europe, so I figured I'd do a little poking around in the US election data to see if I see what he saw in Europe. I'm starting with party affiliation. To me, that seems like a strong indicator of party support. I'm not a registered member of any political party. I switched my voter registration to unaffiliated after the genocide against the Palestinian people went into berserk mode last October.

One source of data is a poll that Gallup has conducted since 2004. According to Gallup, the number of respondents saying they're a Democrat went from 28 percent in 2004 to 23 percent today. Republicans went from 32 to 25 and independent voters went from 40 to 51 (June 3, 2024)

That shows that in 20 years, the number of Democrats has dropped by 5 percentage points. Voters calling themselves Republicans has dropped 7 percent and the number of independents has jumped by 11 points.

If I had 5 and 7, I get 12, which is pretty close to the 11 percent of voters who switched to independent. Those independents are pretty evenly split in that around half choosing Republican and half preferring Democrats.

Think about this for a minute though. Only 23 percent of voters consider themselves Democrats. It's about the same for Republicans. That leaves more than half of all voters not members of either political party. The problem with this is that with an electoral system built around political parties, and with people less and less inclined to associated with those parties, the results are unexpected, unpredictable elections in which unpredictable candidates win.

Donald Trump is the most glaring example of a broken party system. All Trump needed to do was control the party, and the donors, and the GOP was his for the taking. The list of unqualified candidates winning elections is shocking to consider.

The current party system is a clear and present threat to democracy and our ability to self-govern. The two-party system that the oligarchs have built over the last couple of centuries has got to go. It can not serve the people, and that is becoming clearer with every failed election.

Now we're staring at the prospect of Trump returning to the White House, or Joe Biden. Biden might not be as crazy as Trump, but he also doesn't seem to know what's goin on most of the time, and when he is lucid, he's engaging in genocide.

We need to break the back of the two-party system and allow for more players to play in the pool. Don't give them a mandate. Either don't vote or vote for a party that isn't a D or an R. And to those who say not voting is stupid, there is academic research on the power of not voting. It is real - look it up.