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Yes, Tom Perez, I got your fundraising email and I will commit to vote. However, I won’t commit to vote for the Democratic Party or any other party.
I will vote for sane candidates who aren’t overtly beholden to any special interests, even the ones I agree with. I will vote for candidates who are interested in being representatives and not puppets. I will vote for candidates who approach their duties with rational well thought out ideas and an openness to those who view things differently.
I don’t have to agree with any candidate 100% but will oppose any who are simply ideologues only seeking an office out of self-servitude. Don’t think they’re hard to spot.
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I have voted for Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents in the last several elections and will continue to do so. That fact alone makes me an outcast to extremists from the right and the left, and I am ok with that, mainly because extremism is the real problem in this country. People unwilling to listen to any argument other than the one their chosen cult is expounding. An extremism that only cares about winning, not about issues.
Currently, the extremist nature of the GOP is scary, and I view it overall as a danger to Liberty, Democracy and the American system of government. A few years ago I would have said the same about the Democratic Party. Power is a dangerous paramour, that seduces even the most well-intentioned politician. That is why parties sway back and forth from extreme to moderate without ever really settling on a rooted longterm platform of intelligent, competent governing.
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The problem is the voters refuse to recognize when the party they have sworn their oaths to move to extremism. Instead, they fall in line, abandoning ideals that they once held dear for the chance to be on the side of power, once power changes hands those ideals return, suddenly becoming important again out of the need to be a contrarian. (See: Taxes, War, Privacy Issues)
That, in a nutshell, is why major legislation is rarely more than an overhyped stopgap. It’s just the “win” for the party currently in power, only to be gutted or destroyed after the next mid-terms. It’s why national problems never get solved; it’s why today epidemic will be tomorrow’s epidemic. You guarantee yourself a steady cycle of power grabs when you keep hot-button issues steadily frontloaded as the scourge the other party ignores, and the one your party cares about and can solve.
It’s easy to be caught up in the political waves; social media has empowered many with a faux sense of knowledge. It has also taken away our ability to reason and research for ourselves. We’ve replaced the need for truth with the desire to be right and abandoned logic for loyalty. A Facebook post, no matter how untrue or poorly vetted, becomes eternal fact if it agrees with our own cognitive dissonance. Thousands of thoroughly fact-checked pieces could be posted ten minutes later destroying the aforementioned post, and they go ignored.
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Why fix a problem guarantees the long-term success of your organization? At this point, I don’t even think the public wants anything solved. We are obsessed with the carnage, gridlock, and drama. We love the ability to call people stupid, unfriend them because they don’t agree, and claim our own piece of moral authority.
There are a lot of politicians in Washington that are a problem to the health of this nation. The important thing to remember is that we put every one of them there ourselves. If the voting public cared about the issues the polls say we care about, things would change. Unfortunately, we only care about winning, even if winning means we lose.
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