Even with the election over, the threat to our democracy is not. Joe Biden, a relative moderate, won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Meanwhile, our president continues on with allegations of fraud, legal challenges, and replacing people in the Pentagon with loyalists.
Unfortunately, the internal threat to our democracy will probably never end now that extreme ideological beliefs on both ends of the political spectrum have gotten a foothold in our major political parties and in our government.
And then we have the external threat from our two major foreign adversaries: right-wing extremist Russia and left-wing extremist China. Both of these countries are considered oligarchies, which is where a small group of people, typically wealthy, run the country. Both of these countries don’t care for democracy and would like nothing more than to destroy ours. The only people we can really trust are our longtime democratic allies in Canada and Europe.
We have been a democracy for over 240 years and have done very well because of it. We have been a model for the rest of the world and they have depended on us whenever extremists attempted to seize control in places like Korea and most notably in Europe and Asia during World War II. We have been the dominant player in world politics but now our dominance is being threatened. And the last four years has made things worse.
Now it looks like both chambers of Congress will be split almost exactly down the middle with a different party again in control (barely) of each chamber. Can you say more gridlock? This means that our country will continue to fall further behind other developed countries in so many ways. But looking on the bright side, having a different party in control of each chamber of Congress also probably kept our democracy from crumbling over the past four years.
There is, however, one solution that will solve all of our problems. But to implement this solution we have to get over a huge paradigm. We need to realize that having just two major political parties is not normal for a country. The U.S. is one of only a few countries in the world to have a two-party political system and it is destroying us.
The approximately 40% of Americans who are moderates, centrists, or Independents, whatever you want to call us, have little to no representation in government. Moderates make decisions based on facts and science-based logic, we love democracy because democracy is a moderate form of government (our Founding Fathers were moderates), we hate authoritarianism, we are not religious hypocrites, and we believe in the rule of law and the Constitution. We ran our country for over 240 years but we have slowly lost control to those with more extreme ideological beliefs.
We need to push for the formation of a third major centrist tiebreaker party to make sure that our democracy is never again threatened, to do things that make sense, and to end the gridlock that is holding us back. Join with others who understand that the problems that we are facing are due to our failing two-party political system.
There are several fledgling efforts out there to accomplish this such as the Alliance Party (theallianceparty.com), the Reform Party (reformparty.org), and Represent.Us. Volunteer and support these organizations – nothing will happen without you. Moderates are not as passionate as those with more extreme ideological beliefs but this needs to change for the sake of all Americans.