A Quote by Michael Parenti
The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.
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It's the Democrat Party that is destroying the integrity of the American electoral system. It's not Vladimir Putin. It's not Dmitry Medvedev. It's the Democrat Party, which has sought to destroy the integrity of the American electoral system, all because they're a bunch of spoilsports who lost the election.
If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even nowadays in the US, where people on the "Left" are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals.
In America, we have a two-party system, and the American Constitution is a piece of brilliance, but they did not know when they set it up we would just have a two-party system. It just so happens that our electorate pushed towards the two-party system because it's a very good way to govern.
We don't need a two-party system. We need something else. Because at this point, the two-party system is really just a one-party system. And that one party is crumbling.
...the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.
The free electoral process is one of the things that outsiders envy most about this country. The distinctly American two-party system is perpetuated through that process.
The system [in U.S.] is designed for a two-party system. And those two parties have an interest in keeping third parties out. There's too much of the structure that works in the two-party way. They will keep the third party out.
I think the executives have matured enough so that they recognize that we have a two-party system. In California, we have more than a two-party system.
I am more convinced than ever that a lively two party system is essential to our democracy.
We can divide bitcoin people into two camps: one that goes along with the existing system and wants it to work complimentarily with the existing system, and then the other half is basically religiously opposed and wants to invent a libertarian, regulation-free world.
Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true. . . . Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?'. . . . The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs.
The commandment to refrain from placing blame on our parents, deeply imprinted in us by our upbringing, skillfully performs the function of hiding essential truths from us.
In this rigged, two-party system, third parties almost never win a national election. It's obvious what our function is in this constricted oligarchy of two corporate-indentured parties - to push hitherto taboo issues onto the public stage, to build for a future, to get a young generation in, keep the progressive agenda alive, push the two parties a little bit on this issue and that.
There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.
The way to lessen the grip of the Tea Party on the electoral process would be to do what a handful have done and have a primary where all voters, members of every party, can vote, and the top two vote-getters then enter a runoff.
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