One Party Dominance?

Today's "Howard Dean" style of politics leads people to believe that one man or one party is responsible for the ills of our nation. Tell a lie enough times, eventually it becomes the truth. The democrats have found that it is easier to deceptively convince people how bad the republicans are than it is to convince people that their way is better. Their whole campaign strategy is and has been "vote for me, I'm not a republican."

Luckily, that is not how American politics work. The two party system currently in place provides checks and balances so that one sector of citizenry doesn’t end up dominating the political system. The conservative Republicans try to get your vote by appealing to your head. They tell you that you and the majority can have it better than you would if liberal Democrats ran the country for very long. They tell you Democrats prefer "peace through compromising treaties," as opposed to "peace through military strength." They tell you America has been morally declining because of the liberals' socially engineered permissive society, where anything goes." They tell you the liberals want to take guns from everyone in order to "appear" tough on crime, when all we really need are old-fashioned criminal laws making it safer for all law-abiding citizens. Upon hearing this, a majority of Americans would think in their heads that the conservatives were right and would cast their votes for conservative Republicans. Liberal Democrats try to get your vote by appealing to your heart. They tell you that you and the majority are behind the eight ball and the rich are richer thanks to you. They tell you government would be in your bedrooms, telling you what you could and couldn't do legally in a sexual relationship, if the conservative Republicans had their way. They tell you Republicans would arm America with enough nuclear weapons to kill the whole world hundreds of times over.

The majority of Americans seem to feel they are somewhere in between, voting for liberals sometimes and conservatives sometimes, thus giving America a mixture of government working at cross purposes.

Liberalism by its definition is a philosophy that advocates the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and civil liberties. While honorable in its aim, the results of liberalism have been to the detriment of society as a whole. Does the ability to go out in the streets and attack your nation's policies, or betray your oaths to your government or spouse make us a better country? Liberals believe that these individual freedoms are what's most important and that we are better off as a country with freedoms of abortion, divorce, no regard for religion. That we are better off without the blanket of moral judgments that religion imposes. While I think that individual freedoms are great, the reality is that with rare exception we don't exist as individuals. We exist as members of a society, and being a member of a society requires that some individual freedoms be sacrificed for the betterment of the society. The Founding Fathers understood that, and enumerated a solid set of freedoms that every American should have for a good quality of life. It seems to me that they were on the right track as many of the "freedoms" added more recently have done little more than drag society down.