Our Two Party System: Ideological Divide-and-Conquer

British political dialectic

The false left-right continuum in political discourse, more often than not, is economic: equality as opposed to inequality, government intervention as opposed to free market, tolerance as opposed to status quo. This political spectrum, in existence for over 200 years, has significantly moved to the right. To understand just how far it's shifted to the right, consider former Republican President Eisenhower's farewell address  warning against the dangers of the military industrial complex, and the "potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power [that] exists and will persist.” Not to mention, Eisenhower invested heavily in our national infrastructure, and the marginal tax rate on wealthiest American, at the time, was 91%!

So, right now, the Democratic Party is more conservative than many former Republican presidents. Moreover, the two parties have become almost indistinguishable.

The Hegelian dynamic (Thesis v. Antithesis = Synthesis) at the core of American politics.

No matter what the issue, this invisible dialectic controls both the conflict and the resolution, leading everyone into a new cycle of conflicts, often involving violence and bloodshed, endless war. This constant conflict and continual merging of opposite ideologies, established by extreme right or left groups, is supposed to lead to unification, global order..

Our left-right political paradigm  is a great example of this dynamic as the governing class has always created artificial extremes ("thesis" and "antithesis") to superficially conflict with each other to create "synthesis", which is made to appear to be the product of consensus. The dirty little secret about the consensus process is that any and all issues discussed usually have a pre-determined outcome.

In other words, the conflict between political left and the political right eventually causes the two sides to compromise toward "group think", forming a center ground. Over time, this process has all but removed any significant difference between the two parties; however, at the same time, plays up insignificant and/or created differences - gay marriage, abortion - to perpetuate continuous conflict. And because power, by nature is conservative — it wants to protect its current privileged position - it follows that this "center ground" is disposed to preserve existing conditions.

Most of us totally oblivious to the fact that we're voting for basically the same ideas regardless of our political affiliation, yet we're totally unaware that we do not have a choice at the polls. To become aware, step outside the dialectic and release yourself from the limitations of controlled and guided thought.