Everyone knows that American politics aren’t working. A big part of this is because we’ve spent two hundred and thirty-five years trying to distill an enormous variety of political stances, social philosophies and financial opinions into two more-or-less diametrically opposed parties – but I’ve bitched about that before. Suddenly, though, I see the perfect opening for a viable third party that a majority of Americans can get behind. A party whose philosophy and platform are nearly universal and whose appeal is undeniable. A party that can actually effect serious change in the United States simply by getting themselves elected. 2012 will be the year of the You Fucked Up Party.
The You Fucked Up Party (YFUP) has one simple statement that we want to bring to Washington: you fucked up, you fucked over the American people, and we’re kicking you out now.
The aim of YFUP is to unseat as many of our current political leaders as possible, on federal, state and local levels. In order to run for office under the YFUP banner, you must never have held public office before, must swear to only seek a single term, and must always understand that we’re watching you and we will recall you in a heartbeat if you start fucking around like our current government, dragging our country into the toilet while you collect money from K Street and fighting to the death over party-line issues that the majority of the country either doesn’t give a fuck about or is more than happy to compromise over just so something actually gets done for a change.
Why is now the time for YFUP? Because we’re all sick to fucking death of the way things are going in Washington at the moment. A recent CNN poll indicates that after the whole debt ceiling clusterfuck a majority of Americans think that their representatives don’t deserve to be re-elected, and a separate New York Times/CBS poll indicates that congress is currently enjoying a record-breaking 82% disapproval rate. Though the Democrats have come out slightly ahead in the polls, they’re still looking at 66% disapproval. The Republicans have bottomed out at 72%, and the Tea Party’s support has taken a nose dive in the past six months. Across the board, people are just sick and fucking tired of the “we’re only in it for the rich and our lunatic base” attitude that basically every elected official in this country has displayed lately.
The glory of YFUP is that it does not have a party line, so there’s no need to fall into the goose-stepping ranks like those other parties. In fact, I heartily encourage several people to run for any given seat under the YFUP banner so that the voters have a smorgasbord of candidates from which to choose. And with no party affiliation and a one-term limit, there’s virtually no way that YFUP politicians can turn their brief but spectacular political careers into lobbying cash cows. They just serve their time, do what their goddamned constituents tell them instead of what some out-of-touch party leader whose only actual concern is getting the most partisans possible re-elected tells them, and go on their merry way, wrapped in the adoration of the people they represented.
This is not a purely American idea, either. Hey UK! Your government seems to be in a bit of a pickle right now. Why not tell everyone from those Fight Clubs you call political parties exactly what you think of how they’ve been behaving in a way that doesn’t hurt innocent civilians and destroy small businesses and private property? Hey Iraq, tired of the sham “free elections” you’ve had since we “liberated” you? Form up your own YFUP (or whatever the acronym would be in your language – it will almost certainly be 300% squigglier!). Hell, Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Syria are way ahead of us on this one already. The Arab Spring was like one giant YFUP sweeping across Northern Africa and the Middle-East. Once again the cradle of civilization shows us the way forward.
My brothers and sisters, my fellow citizens of the world’s fucked up nations, instead of constantly bickering on the niggling little details of our various ideologies, let us rally around the one opinion that we all share – that our governments have fucked up, fucked up royally and fucked up consistently – and let’s go out and goddamned well fix it.
