Grooming Politicians for Christ - Unbelievable

Most people killed were killed in the name of God. Religions add fervor to any conflict.

I do fear a nation ruled by any religion, just as I fear a nation ruled by nationalism.

A third party would most certainly be a blessing.

No it won't.

Over here in UK, we've technically got a third party. They're called the Liberal Democrats. They have never had a candidate elected as Prime Minister. Never.

Probably something to do with the fact that in all their ads, their leader looks like a spokesperson for alcoholics anonymous. (And seeing as he's appeared as a presenter for a a BBC TV show that pokes fun at politicians and current affairs, "Have I Got News For You" I severely doubt he'd ever be elected).

A third party won't do anything, especially after all your years of having merely two parties. Like our Third Party, it won't get enough votes to win any Presidential election.

Those are series of statements from authority, for which we don't know you to possess any authority. The Republican Party was a third party in 1856, when it failed to win a national election. Lincoln only won the 1860 election because the Democratic Party split fatally. He was a minority President, and the Republicans did not win so much as the Democrats failed to win.

You don't know what the hell you're talking about. For a third party to succeed in this country, they'd have an uphill struggle all the way--the entire process is now set up to exclude a third party, precisely because the Republicans and Democrats fear such an event. That does not, however, make it impossible. Arguments from analogy about "a spokesperson for alcoholics anonymous" are just silly, and have no force.

Certainly a two party system might be ok if the two parties are substantially different. Here we have nothing of the sort and what's happened is that one party is completely marginalized and no longer a true opposition. We need something else to step in. Could it end up a two party system again with this new party displacing the democrats or the republicans? Probably, and maybe that would be ok. But right now, voters need a third option.

Who me?



Well, we agree that a third party won't be of much use after its formation. Just for different reasons.



That was just a passing remark.

Here is a list of Prime Ministers from the United Kingdom. Notice how Liberal Democrats are nowhere on the list. The Liberal Party, which later on merged with the Social Democrats to become the Liberal Democrats used to be the Second Party back when Labour was an early party.

The third Party has never been elected into power. Only when one of the two major parties weakens does the third Party get elected into power and once that happens, the Third Party never seems to get back into the top two.

This in effect means, despite how many parties you have, you will always end up with a Two Party System with a race between the top two parties, which is, I guess what you described.



I don't know, but it seems as if the political climate in the US and UK are identical in that the opposition party isn't much of an opposition and the third party isn't much of an opposition either.

I fear for our politics.

You failed to provide the list of PMs, but it wasn't necessary, not for me, at any event. I see i need to remind you that the Whigs, the party of Earl Gray which shepherded the first reform bill through in the reign of William IV, is no more. They were pushed out by Labor. The same thing happened in the United States, first to the Federalists, and then to the Whigs. It goes on in all countries, all the time.

The difference is in the electorate, and the systems. In England and the United States, the systems have worked to give significant and undue advantage to ruling paries and the largest opposition parties. It doesn't necessarily work that way everywhere. The odds are very good that if once established, a third party in the United States would change that substantially, because it is highly unlikely that either the Democrats or the Republicans would "die" to make way for a third party's rise to prominence.