I was going to simply add to Malvolio’s commentary, but the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like it deserved a bit more structure than what I wanted to bother with in the comments. So, it’ll get its own spotlight on the front page.

“I think in this post you illuminated the issue but stopped just short of really calling it out. The problem isn’t where you fall on the spectrum, but in believing that there is such a spectrum.”

Well, I think I’d have to say that functionally, in today’s political scene, it’s there. That this spectrum is a political construct designed to drive the masses to the polls with easier determinations of who their candidate (or party) of choice might be, I can agree with. I can’t agree that the existence of it, in itself, is a logical fallacy. I was simply trying to illustrate that today’s Democratic Party simply can’t hope to win my vote because of their position on issues that are important to me.

“Almost everyone that isn’t brainwashed cattle will have some independent ideas about different issues, and they don’t often all go together into a neat category. Your opinions on gun control, abortion, judicial philosophy, foreign wars, fiscal policy, immigration, and so on are not all things that can be sensibly placed on a single left-right spectrum. The belief that they can serves those with an interest in maintaining the idea that our government is a “two-party system”, but does a great disservice to political discourse in this country.”

I agree with the first statement, obviously. For instance, I’d never win a Republican nomination for a federal election by admitting that I’d push to legalize prostitution, or pro-RU486. Those are positions I have independent of the “party line” based on my own opinion and belief system. While they don’t all fall into a neat category, as you say, I also realize a few things:

• No politician I vote for will necessarily fit my own interests perfectly.
• Whoever I end up voting for, regardless of their initial campaign rhetoric, will be forced by our corrupt political system to “fall in line” with the “mainstream” of the party directly upon arrival in Washington. Therefore, I, like most, end up voting on the “lesser of two evils” principle, based on what I know about the party and its base.
• Until there is significantly more real outrage about the state of politics in this country (and I don’t think Jack Abramoff is gonna cut it), no other political party in this country has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning significant national elections.

So, while America wasn’t a two-party system by design or decree, we do in fact vote inside of one, for all real intents and purposes. Candidates for neither of the major parties are really allowed to step away from the party line when voting time comes, and it’s well-documented that those who dare to will simply be marginalized, rendered ineffective by their party and then left unsupported at re-election time. Therefore, the “spectrum” is created at the “poles” at the extreme ideological ends of both effective political parties, and nuanced modifications of those ideologies slide along between the two poles depending on their relative proximity to the poles in question. Shadows of Amber, if you will.

That’s a bit more convoluted than I really wanted to get, but I can’t figure out how to clean it up at the moment.

Does all of this do a great disservice to political discourse in this country? Absolutely. I can’t deny the reliaty of the political landscape we face, though.

“One of the biggest problems I think it causes is making people feel like they need to stick to “their side” once they get drawn to the “left” or “right” by whichever issue they care most about. This allows issues that are relatively minor in the grand scale to have a disproportionate effect on political process.”

In all honesty here, and this is going to sound simplistic as hell… I blame the abortion debate for polarizing the electorate this way. For a vast majority of the American population, abortion is either an inalienable right of a woman to “choose”, or infanticide. As I mentioned earlier, an issue defined by two extreme differences in ideology, with more nuanced positions in the “middle” of the issue drowned out by rhetoric from both ends (here’s the damage to political discourse that you mentioned). When you force an issue like that to become a federal one, you immediately and irrevocably polarize the electorate in exactly the fashion you’re describing. Issues like it are what create and perpetuate the use of “the spectrum” in American political discussion and debate. I just don’t see it changing anytime soon.

I think taking the federal government out of these kinds of issues and getting it’s feet back on the right track would go a long way toward healing these divisions and depolarizing the electorate. Unfortunately, we seem to have a dearth of statesmen willing to carry that flag.

But to answer your question:

of course you’re a nutjob.

Yeah, I left myself wide open for that one, didn’t I? Hehe.