There was a time in my life when I couldn’t tell you the political parties of almost anyone I knew.

Parties didn’t define any of those people as much as other things about them. They weren’t Democrats or Republicans. They were teachers, bankers, farmers, electricians, nurses, housewives, mechanics, retirees, students. They were Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Jews. They were volunteers, and they were contributors to more causes than I can count.

I knew about parties, sure. I knew they were very important to some people, but to the majority of those in my world, it was a box that was checked on a form when you registered to vote and didn’t think about much the rest of the time.

It started to turn in the early 1990s, becoming more and more important. The day I realized my uncle’s party was like the moment Dorothy stepped into Oz. Everything went from shades of gray to clearly delineated color.

We now live in a world where everything is red or blue. Even if you think it’s another color, you’re wrong.

Red used to mean communist, but now means Republican, while communist means socialist, which is obviously Democrat, so it’s blue. Blue means police, but police support is tied to the GOP, so blue is now red. The Green Party isn’t really green because it’s environmental, which means it’s liberal, so anything that is green, including Green, is really blue.

Our two-party system is devouring our entire world. The problem with that is we don’t actually have two parties.

I mean, in reality, we have scads of them. In addition to the Democratic, Republican and the aforementioned Green parties, we also have Libertarian and independents and all manner of specialized parties that might only show up in one state. Alaska has a whole party dedicated to seeing our largest state become its own country.

But most of these end up bending to the two parties in power, like Vermont’s independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ran for president as a Democrat, or Ron Paul, who served as a GOP congressman from Texas and ran for president three times — once as a Libertarian and twice as a Republican.

Even within the parties themselves, there are factions that should really be considered separate entities. On the Democratic side, the more left-leaning progressives should be their own party. The Republicans have the Tea Party movement and what might be called the MAGA Party of Trump supporters.

There sometimes seems to be little left of the parties as they existed 20, 30, 40 years ago. Yet, they still are deferred to as the parties in control when that control is questionable. They sit on the thrones like Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom, celebrating years in power when that power is only ceremonial and real authority long held by others.

It isn’t sacrilege to acknowledge that our political parties — parties George Washington never wanted to see take the reins — have outlived their usefulness. The parties aren’t enshrined in the Constitution. They have wormed their way into tradition and regulation like parasites — and could and should be removed accordingly.

Changing the party system wouldn’t change the political positions of anyone, but like erasing lines on a gerrymandered map, it would allow a fairer distribution of power between those who actually agree with each other rather than those forced into unhappy marriages because there are only two real options.

It would also allow us to get back to those shades of gray, like when Dorothy returned to Kansas — all the wiser for leaving those harsh colors behind in Oz.

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