“The Left”, “The Right”, “Moderates”, …

“The Left”, “The Right”, “Moderates”, … Outdated Pigeonholes!

It’s interesting to me how practically all media pundits [both liberal and conservative], in their reporting and commentary about “goings on” these days, use the terms “The Left”, “The Right”, and “Moderates” to describe what they apparently view as monolithic blocs of people who all fit neatly fit into one of these three categories. Other terms like “The Far Left Wing” or Sanders/Warren Wing, “The Far Right Wing” or Tea Party Wing, and “Mainstream Politicians” also get into the dialog, and could possibly delineate five [maybe six] assumed blocs rather than three.

At the breakneck speed of developments over the past four months, last September seems like an eternity ago. However, my observation here of apparent media pigeonholes reminded me of my 9/28/16 blog post entitled Binary Party Affiliation Choices — We Need Something Better [Read It Here]. I’ve also written, in blogs and in the pages of this web site, about the major Paradigm Shift that is underway in this country [e.g., see this site’s page A Major Paradigm Shift Well Underway; also, search for “Paradigm” on the Home Page to see references to several blog posts].

I honestly believe that politicians — as well as media pundits — who think this way will fall from relevance along with the other components of the Old [and generally, still Current] Paradigm. New Paradigm thinkers are those who fully understand the scope of what I have referred to often in posts to this blog as The Trump/Sanders Phenomenon, and are adapting to it.

A New Focus For This Web Site and My Blog Posts

I mention these observations as a backdrop for describing part of a new focus for this web site and the posts I make to its Blog section. Let me begin that description by backing up a bit and saying that I believe there are [and will continue to be through current and future shifting paradigms] just two basic “camps” into which everybody, either consciously or subconsciously, fits: Liberals [most of whom stem from a Naturalistic Worldview] and Conservatives [most of whom stem from a Theistic Worldview] {For an expansion of the concept of Worldviews, see Why I’m Doing What I Do}. Liberals seem to be trying to shift the terminology describing them to “Progressives”, but I believe that is nothing more than a ploy to attach a connotation of “movement in a desirable direction” to themselves [thereby making it easier to depict Conservatives as “stuck in the past/present and not moving on to better things”]. For that reason, I’ll stay with Liberals.

This binary distinction is actually worse [less accurate, less useful] than the rapidly-becoming-useless three- to six-bloc categorizations described above — and therein lies the seed that can begin to sprout into a solution. Before proceeding to describe my view of that solution and then my plan for moving this site and my blogs to what I’ll call Phase 2, I’ll try to summarize in the next section the basic concept first presented in the above-mentioned 9/28/16 blog post entitled Binary Party Affiliation Choices — We Need Something Better [Read It Here].

Custom-Tailored Political “Parties”

The system I described in that post would allow people to indicate where they are on a far left to far right scale in each of, say, ten specific issues, with their answers resulting in mapping to a specific point on a left-to-right spectrum. Taking it a step farther, each person could then form his/her own “Custom-Tailored Party”, or CTP — i.e., connect [through emails and/or texts and/or web/app interaction designed by that “Custom-Tailored Party”, or probably more efficiently through existing social media like FaceBook, Twitter, etc.] with everybody who is within some plus or minus “band” around his/her position on the left-to-right spectrum. The final refinement suggested for this CTP system was the ability for each person to place a weight on each issue. This weight could be 1, 2 or 3, with 2 meaning average weight for that person, 1 meaning less important/critical than his/her average and 3 meaning more important/critical than his/her average.

The [Now-Developing] New Paradigm

Now let’s assume that the tool is in place — i.e., it has become widely known about, millions of Americans have used it to find and “join” their custom-tailored political “party” [CTP], and the campaign for the first election whose outcome could be controlled by this New Paradigm is getting underway. What would make this a better system? Consider the following:

Campaign Financing. As the Eric Cantor and Hillary Clinton losses [and probably other campaigns less widely publicized] clearly demonstrated, money is no longer as dominant as it has been in determining which candidate will win an election. Something similar to “crowdfunding” [currently popular for business startups, social good projects, etc.] could completely change the campaign financing landscape.
Conventions. These expensive events could become continuous online processes, costing a tiny fraction of what the big events currently cost.
Debates. These could be conducted as Social Media [SM] events rather than “filtered” by media giants and “journalists” — scheduled, as they are now, but live on SM, with SM producing questions based on real-time “topic volumes” identified by the SM providers.
Polls. Pollsters could randomly poll online and weight samples according to the size of each “party”. Much detail needs to be worked out on this to ensure true randomness and integrity of results, but it is definitely doable — also, current polling methodologies have already exhibited serious flaws, anyway, and are not considered as reliable as they have been in the past, so this part of campaigns needs fixing.
Actual Voting? … In the long term, the actual voting process could potentially be done online, but there is MUCH detail to be worked out to make that a reality.

Stay Tuned …

In some of my future posts [not all of which will be on this theme], I’ll develop this concept in more depth. A second part of the new focus for this web site and posts I make to its Blog section will be to present what I believe are pragmatic, workable solutions to this country’s problems — the first of which will be a conceptual framework for a healthcare system to replace the rapidly-crashing Affordable Care Act [ACA, aka “Obamacare”]. As I make changes to the overall structure and organization of the site, I will post announcements about them separately from the overall theme and direction of my blog posts.

Thanks!