That is what is happening now. How do we change the course of our our electorate if we don't vote our convictions?
How does it help to educate the electorate and then only give them the choice between liberal and not-quite-as-liberal?
Right now, there are very few politicans who are truly public servants. They are there for their own good, both democrat and republican. And the parties only exist to be in power. When was the last time the Republican party cut off funding to a liberal incumbant?
The list of electable choices we get in a given election year reflects the profile of the electorate. The political party leaders aren’t stupid. They identify what positions the electorate requires in a candidate, and then provide candidates who either actually do, or can plausibly claim to, hold those positions. The important work of shifting the views of the electorate doesn’t occur at the ballot box. You shift the views of the electorate first, and subsequently you get a choice of candidates that reflect the shift.
You also have to deal with the reality that you’re never going to persuade a majority to agree with you on all the issues you feel are important. That’s been the big flaw in the overall strategy of the various forces desiring to roll back socialism. Quite frankly, the single-minded anti-abortion crusade (with related issues like embryonic stem cell research) is likely to ensure that the march of socialism continues. A large percentage of anti-abortion activists seem perfectly happy to throw their votes away on unelectable fringe party candidates, or just not vote at all, in order to avoid voting for any candidate who doesn’t share their belief that the government has to end legal abortion. This issue drives huge numbers of fiscal conservative and libertarian voters into the arms of the Democratic Party (which might as well be called the Socialist Party) even though they’re not really comfortable with the degree of socialism there. It also forces the Republican Party to accept a lot more socialism than many of its leaders really want, because after losing all the abortion-is-the-only-issue voters by being only moderately anti-abortion, and losing the many fiscal conservative and libertarian voters who can’t stomach the idea of government controlling people’s reproductive activities even “moderately”, they can’t afford to also lose large blocks of voters who fear cuts in Medicare, Social Security, student loan subsidies, etc. (even though many of those voters philosophically don’t like socialism, they’ve already paid a bundle into the system, and therefore can’t afford not to get their share back out again — an imminent need to keep getting your needed medical treatment and keep having a roof over your head, quickly blots out any idealistic notions of basing one’s votes on “philosophy”).
The political reality is that an anti-abortion vote is a pro-socialism vote, notwithstanding that most anti-abortion voters also claim to be anti-socialism. There is nowhere near a majority of our electorate who are both committed to paying their own bills and keeping charitable activity a strcitly private concern (i.e. truly against socialism), and committed to having the government make women have babies they don’t want and in most cases can’t afford to raise without taxpayer assistance. And don’t bother with me with the tired line about “if they don’t want to have a baby, they should keep their legs together” — they DON’T want babies, and they DON’T keep their legs together, and the Constitution does NOT permit the government to have taxpayer-salaried agents run around forcibly keeping women’s legs together.
The most effective way to reduce both the number of abortions and the number of babies born to parents who send their bills to the taxpayers, is to roll back socialism one step at a time, and let ther resulting cultural shift towards self-sufficiency and personal responsibility take care of the rest. For both social and technological reasons, abortion is never going to go away. However, the current phenomenon of large numbers of women using abortion in lieu of contraception over and over and over again, and women just not bothering to get their abortions until the second trimester (or beyond!) CAN be made to go away. These women are products of a society where self-sufficiency and personal responsibility are largely foreign concepts. But socialism has to go away first, and that’s not going to happen until the anti-socialism forces can band together and agree that rolling back socialism needs to be the number one political priority. We’re currently allowing ourselves to be divided and conquered by the socialists, despite the fact that our numbers don’t even constitute a majority BEFORE we’re divided.