This article focuses on the fundamental question of political choice in the United States of America. During the past years, it became evident that political parties became ‘weak’ in terms of their influence on presidential and governmental elections. More specifically, parties cannot provide stable communication between their representative and the electorate, which significantly decreases their influence on the country’s governing concepts. By losing their power, the parties do not represent some idea in practice since all the agitation is provided by political leaders that hope to win the elections (Azari, 2016). Finally, the lack of long-term strategy for both the Republican and Democratic parties made them ‘occasional’ players in presidential elections. As a result, it is critical to realize the existence of a significant problem and consider taking specific and effective actions to increase political parties’ status as the major forces in a country’s government since it represents the ideal concept of democracy.
In fact, throughout the last five decades, people’s ideology connected with considering political leaders representing certain political parties became dominant. From a personal standpoint, I would agree with this statement and support it from another view. Instead of considering the political leader as the most important source of power, which is a distinctive character of the authoritarian type of governing, the society should specifically analyze the values represented by political parties that will become an informational background for individuals’ political decisions. In this case, people would focus more on actions and ideas rather than on personalities representing specific political parties with their benefits and drawbacks.
While analyzing the article, I have admitted that two concepts became more unclear for me after the reading than before. On the one hand, I questioned if it is really important for people to associate themselves with a person representing some values or with an abstract party representing them on their political level. On the other hand, it is also unclear to me what might be the future tendency of political polarization accompanied by the loss of political parties’ respect in the US society.
References
Azari, J. (2016). Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination. Vox.