Acclaimed author Ray Bradbury once said, “I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them — one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.” Fahrenheit 451, arguably Bradbury’s most famous work, explored the exact (negative) effects of belonging to a certain mindset, which could be applied to the United States’ political parties today. With the recent controversial presidential election, America’s citizens have been divided greatly based on political views. Political parties should be dissolved in order to ensure unbiased voting.
Though there are many political parties, the most noticed are the Republican Party, also known as the GOP, and the Democratic Party. These two parties are usually the ones who obtain the most attention in media. Based on a survey by Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Americans obtain their news from television channels. With that stated, television, while the most popular source for news, isn’t always the most reliable. One example is the conservative station, Fox News. The news channel once claimed that, during the Obama administration, government officials were manipulating deportation data to show more illegal immigrants being deported while, in actuality, new deportation laws that included the people trying to illegally cross the border increased the numbers. This quote was intended to reflect poorly on the liberal president’s administration, proving Fox News’s bias. With the immense amount of unreliable news sources, many voters are vulnerable to media that incorrectly strengthens or weakens their standpoint.
One of the many ways political parties taint the vote of U.S. citizens is through ingroup bias. A paper by Purdue University defines ingroup bias as “the systematic tendency to evaluate one’s own membership group (the in-group) or its members more favorably than a non membership group (the out-group) or its members.” Though an instinct, bias truly hinders humans from thinking logically; therefore, the membership of a political party, having use of ingroup bias, promotes illogicality in voters. For example, in an election, voters affected by ingroup bias will automatically disapprove of any politicians of the opposing side, no matter how logical they may be. This leads to insensible voting, something that can harm the U.S.’s welfare greatly.
Many who oppose this solution claim that political parties represent a vast amount of people using generalized viewpoints; however, do broad ideologies actually represent every person that even slightly relates to them? Based on humans’ ingrained cognitive bias, every one of us will have different opinions than anyone else, regardless of party. Generalizing beliefs only silences the people’s opinion rather than correctly representing it as intended. Like, Bradbury once said, “Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.” If political parties were dissolved, the voters would think about what each politician’s values are and how it corresponds to their own rather than stop thinking by agreeing to a generalization.
The bias in political parties seem to hurt America more than help it. One solution to cease this issue is to dissolve all political parties. When this solution is established, the voters’ ingroup bias will be neutralized, beliefs will be more specific rather than generalized, and voters will understand their elected politicians better. Dissolving political parties will get America closer to keeping its promise of being run by the people.
• Claire Scott is an eighth-grade student who lives in Juneau. She has won the UAA/Alaska Dispatch Creative Writing Contest two years in a row.
