The two sides slowly grow closer, both moving to the middle with the moderates. The moderates grow while the fervent supporters grow frustrated: They realize their parties no longer represent them but continue to vote for those parties because there’s no alternative. A vote cast for a “third party” is accurately thought of as a vote thrown away — a vote that ultimately aids the ideology most despised by the voter.

Unfortunately, I’m talking about almost every democracy in the world — but yes, none more so than our own. On Jan. 15, the voters of Michigan were insulted by a broken system and further degraded by ridiculous “Get out and vote!” rhetoric (which translated as, “You’ll do what we tell you and thank us for giving you the opportunity to do so.”)

It is true that if our state had not been penalized, we would have had a say in which Democrat and Republican make it to the “big dance.” But not only is there hardly any difference between Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., there’s only a little difference between the two parties to begin with. Condescending regurgitations about the sacred virtue of voting — and how failing to vote is more or less failing as a human being — normally translate to “You’ll pick your poison and thank us for giving you the opportunity to do so.” Having no choice at all isn’t much worse than having an illusory choice.

Consider the same-party criticisms of our last two presidents. From the “left,” Bill Clinton is lambasted for supporting globalization and free trade (think North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA). For the newly converted George W. Bush bashers of the “right,” the preferred complaint about him is that he’s expanded the federal bureaucracy “like a liberal.” It’s fair to say the left and right differ within certain limits, but outside those limits both support things like free trade and big government. Beyond economics, there’s still much in common: How many politicians actually advocate legalizing gay marriage — or support the amendment banning it for that matter? On immigration, who dares call for a wall, or “amnesty?” I recognize that moderate positions are popular, and extreme ones unpopular. That’s part of the problem. We value both independence and compromise, which aren’t always mutually exclusive: With only two parties and two ideologies, independence and compromise must be “moderate.”

This won’t sit well with the fervent MSU supporters of presidential candidates, the Students for So-and-So, who will be outraged that I likened their candidate to any of the others. They will deplore my pessimistic, complacency-inducing arguments “reversing years of hard-won progress among students,” as though we’re all cattle whose fickle voting habits are to be impartially discussed by talking heads on CNN.

Here’s the reality: If we don’t want to be complacent, if we don’t want to be manipulated and exploited, and if we want to have a say in how our government is run, it’s going to require severe and fundamental changes.

Proportional representation would be a start, but the real change must be in our minds, where it is our nature to make sense of the world through binary oppositions (such as Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola, art vs. science, East vs. West and even pirates vs. ninjas). Though sometimes useful, in politics these ideas are too simple. There’s a reason why “liberal” college students are in love with capitalist pro-life U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, why purportedly repressive Catholicism has strong ties with the labor movement, why some poets love a war and some truckers love Al Gore. Binary thinking is what gives us the winner-take-all, two-party system that chokes plurality and much of what a legitimate democracy needs to survive.

Joel Reinstein is a State News columnist. Reach him at reinste5@msu.edu