Yoking the Two-Headed Eagle

America, your political parties sure are... passionate. Ever consider tacking them in the same general direction?

“Wait, flesh female humans really exist!? Like, they’re people? Well, crush them! I thought female-type ideas only floated in on the wings of online bogey-men.

“This isn’t fair, because! They have the nerve to be DIFFERENT FROM ME!? With a completely, almost biologically different way of looking at the world. And the future. And they want things, just like I do?

“Does this mean I have to compromise in what I want? No matter where I go, in which civilization, or what era it is, there are gonna be women around?

“Well, FUCK THAT! They’re too dangerous. They make no sense to me. You say they have a purpose, well feh. The only just solution is to politically disenfranchise them. FOREVER. Let’s go, team!”

Yeah, that sounds nuts. But sub in the word “conservative” or “left-wing” for “woman” and you’ve got an ugly parody of the way most political team players—particularly on the left, amongst the particularly sheltered—think.

You can call the solution I outline below utopian, because that’s your first gut reaction to any new solution, I don’t like the idea of transitions myself; but the problem right now is that we’re mired indeed in utopian thinking, with everyone fantasizing about what they would do without the rest of humanity trying to cling to the steering wheel.

There seems to be an underlying belief that you can somehow neutralize Them. Or convince them to do better, like you. It’s not realistic. It’s biology. Even back in ancient Rome, there were roughly equal numbers of Optimates and Populares, right and left; the hemicycle in France divided against the same lines, and you’ll get a primitive such distinction in a kindergarten class. The other half of humanity will always be with us.

Either we have a system that allows for this, or eventually we get a Caesar and an empire, and the fun begins to end.

The Biological Basis of Your Bullshit

After a couple decades of Internet echo chambers, an unmanageable proportion of you mob-traveling psychopaths seem to assume that politics can only work if your team disenfranchises the other, by hook or by crook or by setting entire cities on fire.

“Source”?! FUCKING LOOK AROUND YOU.

The partisan chaos. The pendulum swings. The leftists whining about the sudden crop of actual Nazis they have manufactured by calling everyone to the right of Trotsky a Nazi Dalit for generations now. Or about the fact that someone questioned their ass-wiper slave-taking. (Not that the Tories are against slave-taking, they just want to do it their way.)

Be honest—do you ever feel that the only just political system is one in which your half gets your own way in everything, always, because your ideology is perfect and not at all the result of your biological hambrain?

Don’t you fucking lie to me.

Meanwhile, science is getting closer and closer to converging on a consensus—however little anyone might want to hear it, the less-wrong hypothesis keeps marching on, even if the less-wrong movements are generally filled with jackasses just like every other political grift—that political orientation is MORE HERITABLE THAN SEXUAL ORIENTATION.

Kinda hard to argue from there that it ain’t nohow biological.

Yes, my dear superior rational thinkers; however elaborate your political theories, you are invited to consider the possibilithy that they all might been a screen of lacey harpsichord notes that fall in place to rationalize the gut feeling that arises from your second brain.

But I’ve harped on this ad nauseam before; enough prelude It’s time that I propose a solution.

The Not-at-All Final Solution

So even if I’m among a tiny minority that’s bothering to try, here’s my disclaimer: I have a TERRIBLE track record for trying to come up with utopias.

The first time I tried to solve a political problem with my brainham, I came up with Communism.

I didn’t KNOW it was Communism; I just got a little miffed in my high school economics class about the fact that it seemed almost impossible for someone who was born into the working class to make the math work out for themselves ever in an advantageous way. All those diagrams pissed me off.

So I came up with a solution in my stupid little brain, I wrote it down, went off to college, and discovered to my horror that my idea was actually COMMUNISM, and it had killed dozens of millions of Chinese people and all those kulaks and shit, and the Hmong too and the Poles and Germans and on and on and on.

It kind of scared me off having any ideas for a while.

But I’m decades older and more wily now, so I’m presenting my idea as more of a rough draft than a blueprint, or rather an invitation to a brainstorming session.

I’ve been told by everyone to whom I’ve mentioned it that it’s terribly naive—usually before they actually get done listening to it—and while that’s a fair criticism of anything subsequently uttered by someone who came up with communism in high school, it also seems naive to think we can go on the way we are and not eventually ruin everything (dodges an exploding WAYMO) (Jesus, I think a Democrat office holder of some type was assassinated as I was editing this) (and on and on and on and on).

And, yes, snotty, I am aware that the super-rich shadowy figures who actually run everything are never going to do anything sensible, so why bother suggesting it? They’re nuts and want power.

But I don’t believe in ever wasting a chance to say I told you so.

I am to partisans as Andrew Yang is to robots

So just think of this as barely a rough draft. A place to get some thinking started. This idea will be to the problem of the partisan gulf as UBI is to the problem of robots taking all our jeorbs:

AI and automation putting large swathes of the economy is obviously a huge problem. (I mean, nobody gave a shit when it only affected factory workers and then writers and editors, but suddenly important people are being put out of jobs and oh noes, but that’s a side rant.)

So, somebody came up with UBI (universal basic income). The most effective argument for UBI didn’t seem to be that it would actually work; it was that this is quickly becoming something we gotta do something about, and this is the first clump of shit that’s come to hand to throw at the wall. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were as easy as taking the welfare apparatus we already haveand generalizing it?

But when we tried it, as it turns out, UBI was not a great solution. Giving people a comfy income and nothing to do just turns them into entitled, lazy, flaming assholes.

I mean, I probably could have told you that by looking at the behavior of the people who were already getting welfare, but I guess you guys thought they were somehow different from the rest of us.

Welp, apparently we all suck.

Well, most of you suck. But the fact that there are ten people like me on the planet doesn’t mean this is a good solution. So we’re going to keep looking. I’d like to hear a better solution if anyone has it, by the by.

Same goes for the partisan problem. If you don’t like the shit I’m flinging at the wall, find your own.

With ALL of that being said, here’s my suggestion.

Fighting Each Other Instead of the Waves

Currently, our rational political system has organically devolved into a ship with a helm, a rudder, and a mainsail, and the two parties are constantly fighting a more-or-less winner-takes-all battle for each part of the ship. And behold, we’re fucked.

We list too far to one side, then to the other, forgetting whither or whether we had all decided to go; we seem to be tacking into oblivion. Furthermore, people spend more time fighting for control than they spend on actually sailing.

Instead of a democrat and a republican fighting over one seat out of every district, why don’t we guarantee a leftist seat, a rightist seat, and a centrist seat for every district?

Instead of fighting and disenfranchsing the other team—which, I can’t say this enough since it seems to have a hard time piercing your skulls, is ALWAYS GOING TO BE THERE, no matter how much propaganda you subject them to, and MAYBE JUST MAYBE they weren’t born an inferior species to you, but they are an integral and necessary part of the same species, a different outlook on the past and future that evolution has preserved through trials your little candy ass cannot possibly imagine—

—why don’t candidates compete instead for control of their own team’s seat?

That’s right, don’t even fight with the other team. Guarantee each team an equal number of seats, set aside another third for the moderates, then let the electorate fill them with the best candidates each point of view can muster. The partisan fight doesn’t begin till you hit the legislative floor. You send the best into that ring instead of doing all the fucking around outside of it.

Imagine if politicians were chosen for how well they uphold their own left- and right-wing principles, rather than us picking the guy we think is gonna ream the other team good?

“What about the presidency? Sure we can have a thousand assholes in Congress, but what about our substitute king? Who’s going to have the football?” — I dunno, you could say triumvirates worked for Rome; then again, there were triumvirates that came out during some rather turbulent periods, so I don’t know if they’re healthy. They might actually be a good solution for turbulent times; this is why I’m asking wiser minds to contribute to this draft (but credit me, god damn it, motherfuckers).

Also, the Air Force already has another football. You really think they’re going to let some dumb civilian politician asshole launch the nukes by himself in any scenario? You’re nuts.

Anyway, showing up to negotiations with other countries as a gang of three could have plenty of upsides along with its downsides. The triumvirate will have to be composed of grown-ups who can do the art of the deal in peace and wartime without having their drug buddies blow a gasket, I guess. Although there’s always room for humor.

The System of Me

Yes, everyone has a certain degree of narcissism, and as a moderate, I admittedly relish the role of having the final say. Being the referee. Arbitrating between everybody else’s heartfelt notions.

Why not make it orderly?

Because that’s the unspoken way it works already, at least in presidential elections:

1. The Democrats pick the person who’s next in line for the throne (I swear they have a secret sign-up sheet, and probably jockey like junior high kids for position on it), and then

2. The Republicans pick the guy they think is going to beat that person (it probably was the opposite in 2008-2012 so calm down), and then

3. The independents are the only people whose vote actually counts in the general election.

It’s a bitter dreg of power when you don’t get to pick any of the candidates in the first place.

I’m asking you to give us better choices, in a less chaotic and insane way.

How about instead we: 1. Pick a slate of candidate’s for each position’s guaranteed seats, left, right, and center, and 2. Let the parties vote on their representatives? Then within the parliament, allow the left and right to come up with solutions, and then the centrist politicians help them synthesize or choose a solution.

(Not that I want to be personally involved in any of this anyway; I’ve always hated politics, which is why I want you to do this shit in a quiet and orderly fashion, preferably nowhere near my lawn.)

Is this letting the left, right, and center have a stranglehold over politics?

Well, yes, because biology has a stranglehold over the way we “think.” I put think in quotes because there’s obviously so much emotion involved (dodges another WAYMO).

This is the animal we are. There is a past, and there is a future. There are people who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and there are people who want to keep sitting in the dirty bathwater. The more we try to fight any binary, the harder it binaries back in our face.

This is the way it keeps washing out, so let’s do it in a civilized way. We have too much shit that explodes to let the clowns keep running the circus.

What do you want, a seat for the purple-banana-washing-water party?

Even plain old moderates seem to be a tiny, drowning minority, but that might just be an optical illusion created by the heavy rewards the Internet doles out to partisan screeching.

The Enlightenment did a lot to show us the ways of the world. But it left us with a political paradigm that still leaves us in denial about the ways of ourselves.

Does it take an actual civil war to get you to admit it? There are two ways of looking at the future, like our hambrain comes in two halves, and like it takes two of us to make a baby. We can work with the other half, or we can keep fighting over the rudder, but I’m pretty fucking bored of the latter, when I’m not scared.

As I said at the beginning of this six-month-long train of thought, the Magat or Libtard is your brother. Or sister. And despite all your fantasies, they ain’t going away.

It’s time to grow up. If I sound naive, so be it. Maybe you kids don’t even want to get along. But I don’t want to live this way.