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T8312 You can on the social side lean left? You know gay rights, ending racism etc. And still believe in Capitalism.
See, you said it yourself, you can’t describe your worldview without saying something like “lean left on these issues, right on those”. Yes, of course there are other worldviews like yours, but they’re just different mixtures of the liberal and conservative worldviews. There’s left and right, and then there’s sometimes left and sometimes right. There’s blue (liberal) and red (conservative) and various different shades of purple (like your worldview), but there’s not a yellow or a pink or a brown. All of the other worldviews borrow from the two most basic worldviews, liberal and conservative.
As for me, I’m a liberal. If you’re really for gay rights and ending racism, then you should be for a robust government to protect gays and minorities. Small government, low taxes, laissez faire markets, etc. are inherently racist, sexist, and homophobic because the negative impacts of those policies hit traditionally disadvantaged groups like women, gays, and minorities the hardest.
The reason third parties can’t currently thrive, especially at the national level, is that we have a winner-take-all system. If you have a third party it’s either going to be another liberal party that will draw votes away from the primary liberal party’s (the Democrats’) candidate or another conservative party that will draw votes away from the Republican candidate, or a party that’s sometimes liberal and sometimes conservative and draws some votes from each of the two major parties, probably one a little more than the other; however, our electoral system only leaves room for one winner in each election. If overall more conservatives vote in an election but they split their votes between two conservative (or more-conservative-than-liberal) candidates, whereas fewer liberals vote but they’re united behind one liberal party/candidate, the result won’t be that conservative party A gets 3 seats, conservative party B gets 3 seats, and the liberal party gets 4 seats; no, instead the result will be that the liberal candidate wins the seat and the conservatives, for all the votes they mustered between their two candidates, get nothing for their troubles. Most people, especially most people who put in the effort to cast votes, are liberal enough or conservative enough that they don’t want a candidate of the opposite worldview to win, so they’ll settle on a sub-par candidate who’s closer to their worldview than the other major party’s candidate rather than risk wasting their votes on a third party candidate with fewer campaign resources at her disposal whose platform is actually closer to what they really believe in. And, given our winner-take-all system, I don’t blame them for that.