On 4/14/2011 12:09 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/14/2011 11:52, Warp wrote:
>> When will the Americans realize that a two-party system does not work
>> very well?
>
> Oh, I think we figured that out a while ago. (Actually, it's not a
> two-party system. It just devolved into that. There's nothing in the
> original constitution about political parties at all, and it was one of
> the early amendments that said the president and vice president had to
> come from the same party.)
>
Yeah, there was really no "parties" until about the time of the civil 
war. Then, a "Democrat" party rose in the south, in protest of their 
"civil right" to go any where they liked with their slaves, and other 
similar issues (where some northern states declared that slaves where 
flat out not allowed in them). They *wanted* a central government to 
have complete control over what those sorts of rules where. Some where 
along the line the Dems figured out they had been complete idiots, 
started fighting for real civil rights, while keeping the idea that you 
can't do that without a central authority to make it happen. The bigots, 
racists, etc., having no place else to go, changed sides to the 
"Republicans", and started whining about restoring the right of each 
state to screw over its people individually, without input from a 
federal government.

In a general sense, that is where the parties came from. One that 
believed in a nation, the other which, more or less, figured the US 
should be a bunch of individual nation states, with one sort of central 
watch dog, whose sole job was to coordinate things like wars, or the 
like, kind of like a king conscripting knights from other nobles, to 
fight someplace else, but otherwise letting the individual mini-kingdoms 
alone to do what they want. Personally, I can't comprehend, especially 
given some of the complete idiocy you see some states pass, how this 
"one nation divided" theory of government is supposed to work, even if I 
agree that the other system end up having a lot of useless waste, 
inefficiency and can sometimes oppose one "huge" stupidity over the 
whole, all at once. Neither is, I think, entirely workable, but you need 
a clear idea which stuff makes sense to run local and what has to be 
done globally, and not idiots screwing everything up by trying to 
micromanage the local stuff, from the center, or mismanage the global 
stuff, from 50 different states, with dozens to hundreds of different 
districts, all with different opinions on how much, for example, toxic 
waste, is "actually bad".

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