Neither Fish nor Fowl

Like a lot of my contemporaries, I am difficult to pidgeonhole. I first noticed this a couple of elections ago in an argument with a buddy who was voting for "the other guy." After we got past the bullshit and the rhetoric, it turns out we looked at things very much the same way. It's just that he thought the other fella would do a better job at it than mine. I know this sounds too simple, but I really believe the US body politic is locked in a false dichotomy of the worst Orwellian kind: it's red or blue, Republican or Democrat, black or white, and never the 'twain shall meet. Well, that's pretty obviously bullshit, but on we march, as if that's the way the world works. It doesn't.

We need a viable third party. We have to have one in order to keep this democracy working like it should. Two parties lead invariably to stagnation, where three introduces a dynamism, a cycling of ideas, that helps keep things honest. I've been saying this for years- about 20 years, actually, to anybody that will listen, but I think the two big parties have become such powerful "brands" that there's no sunlight filtering through to allow another party to grow. I used to be more of a conspiracy theorist (particularly as regards the media), but I don't think that's it anymore. It is just the result of all these parties acting in their own best interests, which is all you can ever expect from anyone anyway.

My idea for fixing all this- borne of that political argument with a friend with whom I had more in common that I ever suspected- is www.votematch.com. I own the domain but have never managed to get the energy or momentum to get it rolling. The concept is simple, the best analogy being that of a dating service. In a representative, constitutional democracy, you are basically looking to vote for someone who thinks as much like you as possible (your "best" you, that is) and thus votes as you would vote. The votematch concept would have a candidate fill out a fairly exhaustive survey- not neccessarily on the issues themselves, but perhaps on broader philosophical concepts (like "on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you agree with the following statement: history is unfair"), and submit it to the website. Then YOU, the voter, fill out the exact same survey, and the website returns an "affinity score."

It's foolishly simple, and it's been done since we came up with the idea, but it does not seem to have caught on in a monolithic way. It needs to, in order to engender real change, in the same way that people will almost reflexively "google" an interesting new person they've met. If people got in the ironclad habit of "votematching" they would quickly see that their own ideas and opinions rarely fit in the dogmatic buckets of the major parties. Perhaps, then, a real, healthy, viable third party can finally emerge the old fashioned way: from the ground up.