Political Party Extinction

Political Party Extinction

 

Speak Truth To Failure

Political Party's have gone extinct. Never to return. Cried The Raven.
Nevermore. Nevermore.

Wait, what? ha! ha!

Here, have a chart:

Let's do a little math

x = Personal Communication Power
y = Personal Transportation Power
z = Personal Education Power

P = Party Political Power
I = Ideology Power

P = I / ( x + y + z)

As the denominator of various personal powers increase then the party power diminishes. The chart is for illustrative purposes only and has no quantities. The idea is simply to illustrate  ideology and thinking for oneself are inversely proportional. The more one thinks for oneself then the less one relies on ideology and the root causes for thinking independently are education, transportation and communication power.

• Personal education power enables us to think for ourselves.
• Personal transportation power enables us to meet an ever growing circle of people who think differently, have different cultures and different perspectives and so expand our world view, our thinking.
• Personal communication  power amplifies education and transportation power where we are continually educating ourselves view news and conversation while interacting with ever growing sets of traveling folks.

If you think for yourself you don't need ideology and as a corollary, political parties.

If you understand this then you may leave this essay using the exits at the back of theater, eh?  *~wink*~

Ideology Denied

What is ideology? In a nut shell ideology is religion without the supernatural. Ideology is a collection of ideas that are argued to be dependent on each other to thrive. The political parties have planks and platforms where the planks are required to support the platform. Like that.

The problem with all ideology is the same problem with religion: no evidence. Religions justify ideology in part on the supernatural god. You must do this or God will spank you.

I'm old enough to remember voting machines. Back in the late 1960s, when I was still about knee-high, I remember going into a voting booth one time with my dad. In that booth was a large green voting machine. That green voting machine had two large handles. One of these handles voted straight Democratic ticket and the other handle would cast votes as a straight Republican ticket. Back in those days the political parties campaigned for individuals AND straight party up-and-down votes. I do not know what happened to these voting machines and why they were subsequently outlawed but we still have a vestige of them in our US culture,  an idiom of "pull the lever". In politics when someone is accused of "pulling the lever" then they are someone who is unthinkingly following political ideology, hence mentally pulling the straight party ticket ideology idea lever.


Ideologies are everywhere as they exist in religions, politics, corporations and families, "Our family never backs down from a fight." You get the idea.

One of the reasons I like the TV show Firefly is the constant poking fun of ideology. For example,

Malcolm, "We don't run. We never run."
Wash, "What are you talking about? We run all the time, we ran from Badger, Nishka, the Alliance..."
Malcolm, "Well, fine, but we are not running this time."

The opposite world view to ideology is this: ideas stand on their own. By stand on their own we mean to say the ideas have evidence to support the claims. If there is no evidence then idea does not stand.

The more one starts thinking for oneself then the more one questions ideology and dismisses it outright. Everyone then becomes for an "ideaist": ideas stand on their own.

Ideology, just like religion, is pre-science thinking. People make a bunch of stuff up and say its so and we are all suppose to go along with it. That's not evidence based. Ideology is set of whole bunch of made up stuff, made up without evidence. That's ideology and that's political parties. No ideology, no political party.

The problem ideology is facing today in 2018 is ideologies have been debunked. Take for example the ideological Democratic plank of Unions. The Union idea is to support a platform of worker's rights.

In 2018 does the Union idea hold up? Do Unions support worker's rights or do they create their own kinda of tyranny and hence just replace one tyranny management, with its own? Unions were good idea at the time, but not now. Most obvious is that technology with automation has made Unions irrelevant. You say what? You want higher wages? Here, hold my beer while I automate your job out of existence. Unions have not kept up with the times.

Unions deserve oodles of credit, they brought us OSHA, the 40 hour work week and many other things...but decades ago. What have the done recently? For anyone? Name me one thing?

As an idea the Unions' time has come and gone. We all know it. Management has gamed the US legal system to undermine Unions at every turn. Unions have metastasized into political machines, votes for cash. This machine brought nothing for the workers except a steady state and perhaps staving off the Union's own inevitable demise. We are talking billions of dollars in voting cash.

Once any idea in the set of some ideology's ideas is discredited then this contributes to a slow death,  the ideology dies.

This is the state of political parties in 2018 where the credibility of the ideologies has been lost to a point of extinction. We can now think for ourselves and we don't need to be told our opinion. Back in the low-communication, low-transportation, low-education days of 1789 then ideology was an easy sell. Now ideology is an impossible sell. And we want it that way.

Thinking independently in 2018 explains the apparent the rise of theocracy in America, which sounds weird but allow me to explain. I say apparent because theocracy has not risen, but rather every other ideology as fallen away leaving Christian conservatives as the largest minority ideology left standing. Religion's ideology includes dogma that is defined to be immutable and unchangeable. Think about this for a second: the only ideology left standing in 2018 at the national level is dogma because all the others have fallen away.

Christian Republicans are the largest minority ideology left standing.

The problem is we need ideology, even today. Why? Because the concept of country, the very concept of a nation depends on a shared identity provided by ideology. If there is no ideology then there is  no country, no nation. This is yet again reason 10,232 supporting the claim that all countries must die. Every country and every corporation today must ultimately be wiped off the face of the planet. The power pyramid of bureaucracy must die because of inherent corruption. . Ideologies must die because they are based on false claims, even when not claims of supernatural dogma found in religion.

Conservative Christians represent maybe, what, 20-30 million Americans? There are 300 million of us. Conservation Christians believe they own the definition of our country, of America. They believe they can tell the 300 million of us what's what. They can cajole the rest of us; yell, scream and condescend to the rest of us to make America great again. Ha ha. Fat chance that.

Ideologies only passingly work as a placebo of ideas when they are taken on good faith. People have to believe in the placebo to get any placebo effect of false claims. Guess what? That ain't happening in this post-ideology era.

But here's the crux of the problem. We are a nation. We need a national identity. We need some kind of unifying ideology to function. So, Christian Conservatives get the national floor simply by being the last person standing. We need a national identity. They are the one group vociferously shouting one. The rest of us shrug and go on now, okay then.

Irreni World Scale defines no nations, no countries and no ideology. That's because ideology has gone extinct and thankfully taking political parties with it. The ideology of political party is dead. Today the Democratic and Republican parties have been reduced to some lousy noise machine screaming outside our collective world-view windows while we go about our day, annoying as all hell. Abortion! Gun Control! Racist! Libtard!

We can't put a Genie back in its bottle and we can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Further we do not want too, we don't want ideology to come back because that would mean we've regressed from thinking for ourselves back to blindly following ideas of false claims. No.

So now what?

Now we have lone wolves and not parties.

The Lone Wolf

Hillary Clinton is the dying vestige of the what's left of the Democratic party. There is no Republican party. Neither party has a platform. Both parties are now defined by just handful of wedge issues like abortion and guns. What has replaced political parties today is the lone wolf. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were the two populist candidates of 2016. Neither represented a political party. Barak Obama was a lone wolf who at times publicly fought with Nancy Pelosi they hated each other so.

Jerry Brown, the current governor of California, is a lone wolf. Gavin Newsome, the heir apparent, is also a lone wolf.

Politicians today never publicly present as a party. Politics today is just every person for themselves, so Trump as a narcissist can now make it on the US political stage. The death of the political parties have left only husks in their place.  And in the Republican party case they also left a religious ghoul, Jerry Falwell's ghost. Jerry Falwell's rise in Republican influence can be directly charted against the rapid decline of the Republican party. Today the archaic "Bible as political platform" has risen from the dead precisely because there is no competition, not because their ideas are now suddenly viable. Even more telling is the rise of the "nones" politically. Or rather, better stated, the disappearance of the "nones" politically. The non-religious are the fastest religious growing demographic in the US and they have completely checked out of politics and political parties.

The power vacuum left by the political powers is being replaced by the all too predictable loners, bullies and authoritarians. In previous generations an authoritarian like Trump would have never made it into the primaries, let alone win a primary. Trump's rise burned out the political party husks when saying and doing things that in any other campaign in previous modern elections would have spelled certain political party death. Mitt Romney, Trump's Republican predecessor as Republican Presidential Candidate, got taken to task for saying "binders of women" and then again getting caught on hidden recording mocking the poor. Trump lay waste to the notion of party political gaffe his first week of campaigning and since commits political gaffe after gaffe every time he opens his mouth or tweets.

The political parties have no power to check him. The irony of this is that voting on party line in Congress is all there is as a result of this. Think about it. As a lone wolf like Bernie Sanders one cannot convince fellow members of the party to support their position. Therefore the capricious and meaningless party leadership vote is all that's left because no consensus can be had.

So now what?

The power vacuum left by the political parties creates an environment for the perpetual rise of untold two-bit narcissists going forward. We are going to be locked in political death-match fights every single day playing whack-a-mole with them. It will be exhausting and all the while our country will continue to decline. The best our hard work can do is slow the decline.

Unless, unless, we embrace Irreni World Scale and other replacement government competitors of the future. We can bolster the existing government even as they are slowly replaced over the next 200 years.

We can't get ahead by staying even, we can't get ahead by working hard to keep a slow decline. We need a plan. A new plan. We need Irreni World Scale.

A Final Note

B flat. No.




You can't see what's not visible? Yes.

Ummm, as an atheist I have no common cause with other atheists. Atheists who are not believing in gods provide no fertile ground for common cause. No common cause is the state where the super-majority of Americans find themselves at today. We can't rally around nothing.

Today you might hear a lot about group think in the media. That's because there are those who are still caught up in group think. These are the noise makers in the media today. They are the flash bang grenades of politics. That ain't us. Us? We are lone sharks of no noise swimming below the surface. Freedom means independent thinking and Irreni World Scale promotes this, unlike party politics.

Freedom!

Party On!

Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!