The Millennial Handbook

      The two party system that plagues US elections is problematic for lots of reasons. There’s not a lot of views represented and there’s little room for competition of political opinions by primarily presenting ideological extremes that leave moderate voters in a partisan purgatory. It might be worth exploring why we have a two party system and what we can change about it to make 3rd parties a potent aspect of political discussion.     The author of “Party Politics in America” exquisitely summated why this is the case for two primary reasons. Plurality elections and single member districts (Hershey, 34). Plurality elections are where a candidate doesn’t necessarily have to win by a majority (>50%) but just have to have the most votes. Let’s take a look at a sample election where this can be troublesome.     If this were a plurality election, Candidate 3 would’ve won despite 62% of the voters not voting for them (Figure 1). This problem c...

For centuries, political cartoons have been used to engage in political discourse through a visual medium and convey messages that rhetoric can’t. In an era where political cartoons mostly appear in the dying vice of the newspaper, our eyes have switched over to the endless stream of the shocking, unfamiliar, and contextual style of political cartoons. Memes. It’s no secret that we have to understand the political landscape of the time period in order to understand political memes much like current political cartoons. I want to express the relationship between these two visual styles, how they contrast one another, and how they present differing degrees of nuance. One of my favorite memes from the 2016 election cycle was this tumblr-style Bernie Sanders meme. Source: http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1076338-bae-come-over Let’s look at the parallels, this has all the vital elements of a political cartoon. We have a large piece of central action that most politi...