What has the Democratic Party ever done for blacks in America?

Walter Mosley's article in this week's Nation raises an interesting point about party politics in the United States. Basically, he argues that if third-party interests coalesced into structured political voting blocks, the Republican and Democratic conglomerates would be more sensitive to the muted needs of the nation's disadvantaged.

However, I wonder, if we were to disolved our two-party infrastructure and replaced it with some type of parliamentary pluralism, would we damage the framework for coherent opposition? The last two paragraphs of the article are quite powerful:

America has carried the notion of property and power to such an intensely negative degree that we have very little room left for humanity and art in our hearts. We work long hours, eat bad food, close our eyes to the atrocities committed in our name and spend almost everything we make on the drugs that keep us from succumbing to the emptiness of our spiritual lives. We gobble down antidepressants, sleeping pills, martinis, sitcoms and pornography in a desperate attempt to keep balance in this soulless limbo.

In a world where poetry is a contest at best and a competition at worst, where the importance of a painting is gauged by the price it can be sold for--we are to be counted among the lost. And so when I say that we need leaders and that those leaders must come from our youth, it is no idle statement. We need our young people because without their dreams to guide us we will have only cable TV and grain alcohol for succor.