https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com i think this is half-right. but, it is stuck in two-party politics. i've lived my whole life in a three-party system. we have a conservative party that is roughly equivalent to the american democrats [in the late 70s, when it was morning in america for the conservative movement, the canadian conservative party was campaigning on legalizing marijuana]. clinton & obama would both be tories in canada. we have a liberal party that is historically more equivalent to the american green party - but would also be the party of your elizabeth warrens. and, we have an ndp that has historically been a socialist party and advocated for things like state-controlled industry. in fact, they succeeded in nationalizing the oil industry for a while. sanders would be a member of the ndp in canada. your republican party would be a fringe movement in canada. the closest thing would be the social credit party, but it's a bad comparison, over all. now, the spectrum may be skewed left up here. but, that's not really the point i'm getting at. the point is that we have three parties, not two, and so we have three orientations: right, left and center. in practice, it's neither the left nor the right that run the country - it's the liberal party in the center. we could do this a few different ways. i like to bring in the idea of dialectics. because, if you look at the old literature, democracy has something to do with dialectics. the thing is that america has never really understood this, though. there's this idea in the american political philosophy that if you get right and left at each other's throat, you end up with synthesis in the form of bipartisanship. so, you hear this all over the spectrum. working together across the aisle. it's scary language, on some level - reflective of a one-party state. but, if you know where it comes from, you get that what it's really about is synthesis. except that has never been what has happened. in a two-party system, you never get any kind of real synthesis. what you get are tugs and pulls on the center. you get pendulums sweeping back and forth. the right hand erases the left hand, and then the left hand erases the right - in the long run, it is the opposite of synthesis. the reagan era undid the fdr era. and, the next generation will return the favour and throw reagan in the dustbin, as it resurrects fdr. will this go on forever? will the pendulum swing into perpetuity? if so, the founders will have failed - they intended for synthesis. the two party system was about dialectics, not pendulums. and, what of canada, then? well, the three-party system actually presents a functional dialectic by sending thesis and anti-thesis to the partisan extremes, and letting serious policy happen in the centre. so, it happens to be that the same party that brought us single-payer health care in the 60s also brought us balanced budgets in the 90s. by existing in the center, and synthesizing ideas from the parties on the left and right, the liberals are able to govern broadly empirically - and not ideologically. i've been saying this for months, actually. matthew is absolutely right to point out that the democrats are not a party of the left, and at all. but, the solution is not for the left to take over the democrats. matthew also correctly points out that this will help the right more than it will help the left. the solution is for the left to stop co-operating with the democrats, to spin itself off and let the democrats sit in the middle. to me, the great excitement surrounding sanders is that he might be the catalyst to construct this three-party system, and finally let the dialectic work. remember: conservatives are only wrong about 85% of the time. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/20/11466376/bernie-sanders-future-democrats

• published: 28 Apr 2016
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