The Death Of American Politics

Day 940, 13:03 • Published in USA USA • by NeilP99

At the UIP there is a great player known as Doe22. Now Doe isn’t the most famous player, so it wouldn’t surprise me if most of you had never heard of him. However, what Doe does for the UIP is something that I consider very interesting. You see, Doe tracks the membership of the top 10 parties in the eUS for us. When you’ve been playing the game as long as I have this is interesting to see, because you get to watch the parties grow or shrink based on the things they do in the game. Lately though, the parties have been shrinking for the most part. In fact, over the past two months, membership in the top 10 parties has dropped by 1090 people, or 18.37%. It would be easy to say that the shrinking parties aren’t a big deal but when you consider some of the problems that the eUS has had lately those shrinking parties become more important.

How The United States Of Florida Killed Political Parties
Most of us think of eRepublik as a military game. The economic and political aspects of the game, while having a role to play, take a backseat to war. To some extent this is understandable because war is by definition an international event. As such, it is the best way for a nation to compare its strength to the strength of another nation. In short, you can win the game with war. On top of this, ever since the invasion of North America last summer we’ve heard about the community that has been created in the eUS military. Since the invasion spurred so many people to join the military and fight to free the nation, the community element of the military became much more diverse and developed. Suddenly you could find a degree of community in the military that was previously found in political parties. New players were urged in their “New Citizen” message to enlist in a branch of the military and fight for their country. With all of these players, and all of their potential talent, going into the military, the political parties stagnated. People no longer joined the parties looking for community, because now they got that from the military. Today most of the people who join a political party do so because they want to run for office at some point.

A Dry Well
Over the past few months we’ve heard a lot of people, mostly people who have been playing the game for a while, talk about new talent. They all seem to come to the same conclusion about the new talent, and that is that there is less of it. Now I don’t say this to badmouth any new players by any means, but to point out the reality of our political situation. There are less new leaders stepping up in the political realm these days. All you have to do is look at the people getting elected. Congress has less and less first time members and more and more members who have been in office for more than 5 terms. A recent Presidential election featured two candidates who had both been President several months ago. I’m not saying anything against those veteran players who have been elected before, whether it was President or to Congress, but before a couple of months ago I had never seen a Presidential election where you got the feeling that the candidates were running because nobody else was interested. This is bad news for the eUS. A lack of new leadership means a lack of new ideas. Without new ideas it’s only a matter of time before the eUS starts to fall behind other countries in every aspect of the game.

I’m not sure if the lack of compelling community is because of something the parties are doing or because of the way we treat politics like a dirty word. The Federalist Party has always had a strong community from what I’ve heard and seen. SEES, though a different community than most parties, certainly has a strong community. I can tell you first hand that the community at the UIP is one of the best, if not the best, in the country. I suspect that there are plenty of other parties with strong communities of players. So then why are the parties getting smaller and smaller? My best guess, as I suggested, is that it’s because we talk about politicians, especially Congress, like they’re a negative aspect of the game. While there are some who seriously hate the political element of eRepublik, most of us talk that way because it’s easy to poke fun at the mistakes that members of Congress have made. It’s easy to talk about how heated elections can get and frame that as something that is always a negative. It’s easy to act like we hate politics. The problem that this creates is with the new players. When they’re trying to decide between a military that people rave about, that has a great community, and that has the intrinsic excitement of battle, and politics that people call stupid, lazy, and full of failures, there isn’t really a choice. To be sure, we want people in the eUS military, but we need new leaders and strong political parties as well. Without the strong political leaders of the past some of our great military victories might never had happened. The same will be true in the future. Thanks for reading.