Our world is filled with binaries. Some we barely notice, taking them as they are presented to us. But some are overwhelmingly apparent, such as the current great division between Democrat and Republican in America. But despite appearances, Republican and Democrats do not represent all of America. Often, Americans feel the pressure to choose: Democrat or Republican.
However, what people should realize is that the Democratic and Republican parties do not encompass every single viewpoint in the country.
The struggle for liberal and conservative alike is in their classification of each other. It is automatically assumed that a Liberal must be a Democrat and a Conservative must be a Republican. Americans shove each other into this binary, including the stereotypes that come along with the categorization.
I am a Liberal, but I am by no means a Democrat.
I am not afraid to say that in the last election I voted for Hillary Clinton. But not because she was a Democrat. In fact, I aligned more clearly with Bernie Sanders and the platform he stood for in the election, and as anyone knows, Bernie is not a Democrat. To me, between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Clinton represented more of the views that I believe in. She incorporated some general ideas from Bernie’s platform, but she was not perfect.
I recognized Hillary for what she was, a politician. And a politician does what they can to get the votes. I didn’t want her to be the first female president, I would have rather had someone I respected more. But Trump’s platform was far from what I believed in. It held the same goals of a fascist and utterly racist and derogatory belief system. Given my choices between neo-nazi and semi-conservative, I went with Hillary.
America was not originally a two-party system. And even today, we are still not technically a two-party republic. There are Democrats, Independents, Republicans, and even the Green party as we saw most recently this year. But we are so divided between red and blue that we can’t possibly vote for the other parties. Voters are forced to choose between Republican and Democrat, even if the chosen representative does not in fact represent them. And though I voted Democrat in the last election, if a Republican candidate, who was not conservative and wanted to change things for the better, were to run for office, I would possibly vote for them.
Because I am a Liberal, not a Democrat.
Not all Democrats are liberal, and not all Republicans are conservative. And not every party nominee perfectly represents a viewer’s ideals. But these are the traits that we have associated with the parties. They put pressure on Americans to choose, when political views are not just left and right. It is a gradient scale with a lot of different sections.
We, as Americans, have to stop forcing each other into Liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. We have to open our eyes to shades of grey, people who may not be either left nor right. And like I said, I may be a Liberal but that does not mean I am a Democrat. I just hope that in the next election, better choices are made to bring forth a representative who could truly represent me.
