The death of party politics. No more Right or Left

[ILikeyourHairyHands]

Not sure if this is an AIBU, I think I'm being very fucking reasonable...

I've been mulling recently and I think party politics is defunct, I don't think it's a model that actually works in an increasingly complicated world and I think it's causing dangerous schisms. I'm broadly right-wing, in a traditional liberal sense. I'm a big believer in power being ceded to individuals and the mechanisms to make that happen. I do truly believe that having volition over their own lives empowers people, it makes them stonger. I'm also not an idiot, so I know that we don't have a level playing-field and that people need help and as it's better to give people help to have control of their lives than to decry them for poor choices and deny state help.

My right-wing views are a broad brush that wants to empower individuals and believes that societal change is ground-up from individuals rather than top-down from government.

But politics have become so stratified and devisive, are we really looking at a Corbyn V Johnson government?

That's utterly repulsive to any sane person.

I don't think the Right or the Left have all the answers anymore, the major battles for both sides have been won. And life is ever-more complicated.

I think single-issue politics is the way forward. We now have the technology with block-chain to facilitate micro and macro voting which would give people a voice again. Party politics are redundant, utterly venal and broken.

Democracy needs to change to survive.

Life is too short to get worked up over politics.

Life a lot shorter is some countries because of politics

Life is too short to get worked up over politics.

I've been on MN for a long time and this is by light-years the most ignorant comment I've ever read.

I'm almost completely far left, but I agree with you, OP. I believe the system in the states is worse than ours, but ours is a shambles. And the people have been divided too badly to come together and work together properly to make the country right for everyone equally. I don't think we will ever not have these huge divides in the classes. Something I learnt studying history at uni was that it really is the same shit being recycled; in actual cycles. Same model, only differences are related to the times past and present; the factors of modern life over the older rules and lifestyles of our history. Hope that made sense.

I’m economically centre right and socially centre left. I agree with you, this left wing, right wing crap doesn’t work. We are so divided now that I can’t see how we can overcome it in my lifetime.

We don't live in a democracy... what we have is a combination of Corporatocracy and Oligarchy.

The only lip service we pay to a democratic process is getting to vote for whichever lib/lab/con puppets of the banks, the corps and the wealthy establishment/elite will be our next political leaders.

I agree with nearly everyone on this thread, right or left, political flux and the only resolutions I can envisage are at the extremes. However, watching the hopefuls baring their chests last night, I'm encouraged by how much audience support there was for moderate Rory Stewart. The centre has not collapsed it seems but has been hijacked and silenced by both ends. Fingers crossed.

Ideologies are too theoretical for today's "instant" society.
What is needed is a national strategy. Where do we want to be in 3, 5, 12 years' time and how do we get there?

We certainly are in a state of flux. The Overton has shifted so far to the right that policies that are followed by generally centerist governments (of both sides) are regarded as far left and extreme. This makes it difficult for parties to suggest anything other than policies that fit the very neonliberal, Washington consensus agenda the UK has been following for 40 years.

Social media and the internet are also polarising, they allow people to live within bubbles and to find information that merely confirms their bias. It also allows us to exist on soundbites politics, and for disinformation to be spread easily.

Sorry, I posted and then buggered off for a week. Neoliberalism is the worst of all worlds really, corpocracy, technocracy, all the ocracies, ugh. That's just cedeing power from governments to business which is even worse.

There is now a technology that will give individuals power. Real power. I always feel a bit reticent when speaking about block-chain because it's a bit evangelical.

It's a bit niche, but a huge leap in modern society came about when records were initially kept, we could see what was where, it allowed us to trade. Then, in the middle ages, trade exploded across borders and double entry book-keeping was introduced to keep track of trades and the increasing complexity.

NOW we have block-chain, which is an immutable system of storing information.

A distributed mechanism of saving data, nobody owns the information. It is imuatable. And stored.

That's very fucking powerful.

OP then you're what would be described now as today's centrist. Like most people with a bit of life experience and having been ground down at some point but appreciated the opportunity to dig yourself out.

It's just common sense, which sadly most are lacking and those of us that live in the middle (the majority of us) we're all too fucking exhausted trying to balance everything, pay for everything, satisfy everyone and society norms and then getting kicked a bit further down every now and then. Especially in the past decade the middle has floundered and we're all just too bloody knackered to take a stand on much apart from bigger notions and motions rather than all the small stuff too.

I’m not sure I agree with the premise. Political parties themselves have always had to change to meet the needs of the times, and so the Conservative party of 1900 is very different than that of today. On top of that, there has always been a significant group of swing voters who made the difference between forming a government.