Nick Gillespie explains the impact of technology on politics, and why centralized parties or PACs are obsolete.
November 4, 2014

Whichever side emerges victorious, both Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither party as currently constituted has a real future. Fewer and fewer Americans identify as either Republican or Democratic according to Gallup, and both parties are at recent or all-time lows when it comes to approval ratings. Just 39 percent give Democrats a favorable rating and just 33 percent do the same for Republicans. Not coincidentally, each party has also recently had a clear shot at implementing its vision of the good society. If you want to drive down your adversary’s approval rating, just give him the reins of power for a few years.

- From Nick Gillespie’s article: Relax—Both Parties Are Going Extinct

Like so many others out there, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, I became terrified about the future. I knew the financial system was a corrupt fraud (still is), and I became filled with fear as far as what might happen next. The fear wasn’t that a horribly dysfunctional and immoral financial system would come unglued, rather the fear was based in the uncertainty of the general public’s response.

Historically speaking, many of the worst political regimes are swept into power in a reactionary wave following the destruction of an older, flawed system. Hence the saying:Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Or even:The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In other words, if good intentions coupled with tremendous upheaval can cause a hellish outcome, imagine the potential impact of bad intentions within such an environment. Those were the thoughts that filled my head during those years.

Over time, I picked myself up out of the fear bunker. Not because the media told me everything was ok, and certainly not because the stock market was rising. I transitioned from my brief period of fear because I recognized it as the negative and useless emotion it is. Furthermore, I had taken some precautions to protect myself should the worst case scenario unfold, but beyond that, I concluded that you need to live your life and try to have a positive impact on the world, rather than shiver in a corner. In fact, that’s exactly what the status quo wants, an ignorant population terrified of everything, paralyzed in a corner. In such a state one can be more easily manipulated by propaganda.

The other thing that helped me become more filled with optimism about the future was the things I was seeing at the grass roots level. The grassroots response from both anti-Democratic establishment “progressive types” and anti-Republican establishment “libertarians” had striking similarities. On many of the most significant issues of our day, these two “activist” groups had a surprising degree of overlap. I first noticed it with the emergence of both the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Tea Party. This venn diagram sums it up well:

SNIP-Diagram and more of this excellent article at link