Political survey

@T8312 The problem with that is, what is the “central” worldview? As far as I can tell there isn’t one, you just arbitrarily alternate between using the liberal worldview and the conservative worldview. If there were a “central” party, maybe it would be anti-women’s choice, favor more restrictions on guns, be homophobic, want higher taxes, in favor of the status quo on education and policing, and in favor of drastically cutting the defense budget. That could just as easily be called centrist by American standards, and yet it’s the opposite of the positions you want. How would you make a party platform that would unite all the different kinds of centrists?

There are really only two political worldviews, liberal and conservative, all other worldviews are just various mixtures of those two. To some extent we all use each of those two worldviews a little bit, but the more you pay attention to politics, the more you read and learn, the more you realize that say wanting to reform the police and wanting to keep the defense budget high are in conflict because they are policies that assume two very different, in fact opposite, views of the world. You will move away from the center, either becoming more liberal or more conservative based on which view of the world seems more accurate to you.

Furthermore, because there are only two worldviews, it makes it extremely difficult for third parties to win in a winner-take-all election system like the one we employ in the US. If you want third parties to really be viable then we need to change our election system to be more like those of Western Europe; like say instead of voting on candidates you just vote for a party, and then each party gets a number of seats in Congress that it can fill with any party members it wants to proportional to its percent of the vote it received in the most recent election.

@JP1119 I realize the issue and why no third party could ever exist. But I beleive in compromise over endless arguing and having laws put in until the next party takes over. I disagree there are two world views. There are many many world views. You can on the social side lean left? You know gay rights, ending racism etc. And still believe in Capitalism. Now where do you fall on the spectrum. Both ends. I do understand what you mean though. While at the same time I say that a third party could exist and thrive if both sides keep going further away.

@T8312 [quote]You can on the social side lean left? You know gay rights, ending racism etc. And still believe in Capitalism.[/quote] 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.