In 1976 I remember a liberal friend getting drunk and yelling at me because I was voting for the independent McCarthy as a protest against two-party politics. Of course he wanted me to vote for Carter. Reflecting over that, I came to understand that what this country really needed was a parliamentary system, with proportional representation and multi-member districts, so we wouldn't always have to face the "lesser of two evils" dilemma. Freidrich Engels, in an 1893 letter to Friedrich Sorge (Lewis Feuer, ed., Marx & Engels, Doubleday) offered an explanation of why there was no large socialist party in America. He presented three reasons: 1. the Constitution, which favors the two-party system; "the American," he wrote, "...does not want to throw away his vote [on minor parties with no chance of winning]"; 2. immigration, which introduces numerous ethnic conflicts within the working class [my rephrasing of Engels' writing]; 3. the prosperity associated with the domestic tariff system and the steadily growing domestic market. Too bad some of that energy spent in the 60s wasn't used campaigning for an Constitutional amendment to change the electoral system so that some real choices could emerge. ~ Michael Wright Norman, Oklahoma
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