As we are watching these two sides duke it out, I believe that neither side represents the will of the educated populace.
To counter the position of the Republicans, you can't put the money changers in charge of a country and expect the same libertarian/sovereign rights you got from the founding fathers. If you believe that you are better/stronger by being richer, than you have subscribed to the mental illness known as social Darwinism. Further, you will tend to see the bottomline ideal, as opposed to the human cost reality of cutting spending on social programs.
To counter the position of the Democrats, you need to maintain a strong middle-class in order to allow the citizen to have the choices of what and how to live their life according to their beliefs; you need to bring the jobs back home, and you need to do it now. The ideal that the government can help everyone and still have enough money is based on a reality in which manufacturing and living wages are occurring. Without living wage jobs, there will only be fiat (or without effort) money being pumped into the currency pools of nations.
The Republicans and the Democrats are running on social issues. These are issues that are only relevant when the country that they crop up in is an economically healthy and prosperous country.
Issues like gay marriage, pro-life/pro-choice, affirmative action, immigrant amnesty, birth control, etc. These are important issues. I agree that they are. But as a passenger on the seat of the Titanic, it is like watching two ship captains argue over whether there should be a vegan option on the menu as opposed to agreeing how best to steer around an iceberg.
Icebergs like WW3, bringing manufacturing jobs that left overseas, how to maintain our civil liberties and Bill of Rights, how to get rid of the income tax, crony capitalism, and getting rid of corporate person hood.
People that you know, people that subscribe to the Right or the Left, tend to get hung up on the social issues. Social issues are moral choices. They are easily solved by using the Constitution. For example, the Supreme Court just ruled that banning gay marriage was unconstitutional. Case closed. Or at least it should be.
Take abortion. A very hot topic that some people don't even want to talk about because of past experiences of conversations becoming to "hot" for them to handle. Well, you can talk to me about it, because I don't get "hot" anymore. I'm going to say something that is the crux of the entire pro-choice/pro-life: No one, not one side or the other can adequately decide when life begins. Even if one side brought "scientific" evidence proving their side was right, the other side wouldn't believe it. Pro-life people take the side that, well, we don't know when life begins, so let's err on the side of immediately. Pro-choice people take the side of somewhere in the middle of the second trimester to the first breath... oh, it's my body, I'll do what I want with it (a very Libertarian view point). So, what abortion is is a moral question. As such, it has no place in the law that separates church from state (or sacred from secular). The law hasn't, nor will ever adequately be able to, define when life begins. All it can do is assume that as long as the baby is inside the mother, the law can only deal with the mother. So it is always, and always has been, and always will be, the mother's choice of what to do with the baby. In Rome, the woman would take abortificients, nowadays, it's the morning after pill. The State makes no law on abortion but in terms of a position, looks at abortion as socially deviant, or taboo. That's all it can do. It can only say, "No one likes abortion. No one is excited to have one, and if one is going to happen, it is a result of stupidity, safety, and/or rape." But they exist.
I just gave two examples of social issues. As I said, these are important issues for people as individuals; details in individuals lives that as counted as single in every separate case, is the minority in a country majority.
As long as it takes before we hit an iceberg issue, will be as long as we will all squabble and bicker about the single, social issues.
And that is a pity. Right now, the Left should be mobilized in every city decrying any future war with Iran. The Left should be educating others about the prevalence of "false flag" attacks used to goad the American people to war. The Gulf of Tonkin was a "false flag" attack. In 2005, Robert McNamara admitted that the Navy had dressed a laundry ship up like a fighter ship and then blew it out of the water, blaming the North Vietnamese and getting us into a war that lasted years and killed scores of men, women, and children.
A war with Iran will be met by Russia, China, the entire Middle East and a host of other allies and enemies. It will create a world war.
Instead the entrenched Left is squabbling about what the Republicans are doing.
What is the Right doing? The theological base of the Right is Christianity. As Christianity is being turned into a superstitious "pagan-like" pariah of the masses by the rising belief system known as "science" (I say belief system because most people are not members of the scientific community and therefore take as truth that which is, in the "scientific community" are known as hypothesis, therefore a "relying on the belief" state of mind of masses who aren't scientists, more on this later), it can only turn it's withering, dying, clenched fist on things that it claims to be the last word on, i.e. the social/moral issues of society, yet holds an ever tenuous grip on. That is why there is such debate. The Religious Right can fight the evils of transsexuals, but what about economic theory? What about science? No. Not science. Birth control? You got it. Anything that is, and only is, mentioned (or not mentioned!) within the first and last covers in one book can the Religious Right take cause and fight.
Both the left and the right, for the most part are fighting an inane battle amongst themselves over issues that the majority a) don't experience, or b) are already cool with. This battle that, as I said, is like a little cat fight between two alley cats in the alley's of Hiroshima at about 8:10 A.M. on August 6, 1945, it will not be remembered.
What will be remembered is whether the American people stood up and took offence at our eroding civil liberties. Whether we stood up to rulers in Washington and said, "We don't want your fucking war, so you better fucking not get involved, and if you try to blow something up, like the Statue of Liberty, you're going to see Greece-style rioting in the streets."
http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/statue-of-liberty-next-on-hit-list/
Survival issues are these issues. The real issues. Without jobs, there is no economic stability. Without economic stability, there can be no peace. Without peace there can be no justice. Without justice there can be no freedom.
