In this blog, I will float the idea that the United States should totally disband both major political parties, Democratic and Republican.
The only issues with this idea are: (1) who could actually do it, short of civil war, and even that probably wouldn’t achieve the goal; and (2) what would replace them in the chaos that would follow their demise?
If we have learned anything from history, it’s that not planning the aftermath of political change will probably result in something worse than what was there before. A dilemma! However, before I get into those two problems, I should explain why I think both current political parties in the U.S. should be disbanded.
The Founding Fathers did not anticipate the invention of political parties – that came from political maneuverings between the Southern and Northern states as they fought for control of the country after it was created – the main bone of contention being the attempts of the Southern States to enshrine slavery for the whole country.
Today, both parties have lost the plot; The Democratic Party has gone hard left, and has no discernable program of any sort, even one of how to deal with Trump, let alone anything positive for the future of the country. The Republican Party, in its blind desire to win at all costs, is so naïve and myopic that it thinks, assuming it thinks at all, that it can control Trump’s drive towards dictatorship. It obviously can’t, as Trump has repeatedly shown over the past year.
The Republican Party wants to win without regard for how it is done and, more importantly, what the longer-term consequences of their methods might be. The Democratic Party has no idea how to win; for example, what politician, in their right mind, bases the major points of an election campaign on issues that are relevant to less than 5% of the population – examples would be “Trans” and “LGBTQ”. Admittedly, in that sense, the Republican Party is much better focused in terms of the PRIMARY POLITICAL AXIOM COVERING ALL ELECTIONS which is, “If you don’t win, all of your policies and ideas are totally wasted”.
I humbly suggest that both parties are, for different reasons, totally useless at working towards a United States of America based on the principles on which it was founded. There is a caveat here that the interpretation of the wording used in the Declaration of Independence has profoundly changed over the years.
For example, the country wasn’t founded on the basis of one man, one vote, it was founded on the basis of one landowner one vote, and that voting powers were only for white, wealthy men. If you look at the historical record, as historian Heather Cox-Richardson does in her book “Democracy Awakening”, the Founding Fathers started from the premise of “equal rights for all British subjects, regardless of whether they lived in England or the colonies”. For example, George Washington was severely pissed off that he was denied the equal right of advancement in the British Army, after his successful campaigns in the French/Indian War, simply because he was a colonial.
It may come as a shock today that it never occurred to any of the Founding Fathers, including Washington, to think that equality included blacks, women or indigenous people, or even poor white men. That adjustment didn’t happen until Lincoln.
To the future!
Having suggested that both parties have “lost the plot” in ways significant enough to warrant their demise, I feel obligated to offer suggestions on how to fix the situation. I’ve always believed that if you are not prepared to get involved in decisions that affect your life, you have no right to bitch about the results of the decisions that are made for you.
The ideal solution would be to find a benevolent dictator, who would sort out the parties into conservative and liberal factions (We will always need that balance), and then retire to let them get on with running the country, but that’s about as idiotic a plan as hoping the current parties will reorganize themselves.
Plans developed by the country’s intellectual elite, perhaps a series of competitive public service projects within the university system, would also be a possibility, except they would never agree on anything, and take decades to realize that couldn’t agree on anything. Another non-starter.
An enlightened Congressperson or Senator might be a possibility, but they inexorably subject to lobbying and vested interests that such an idea is unlikely, if not impossible, to work as a viable plan. Besides they would suffer from the same malaise as the academics; they would take decades to agree on anything.
The chances of it coming from a grassroots source are equally unlikely because getting any sort of consensus, creating a structure to support such a movement, and actually getting such a movement off the ground would be a monumental exercise and therefore probably doomed to failure before it started.
I’m running out of plausible alternatives!
One possibility that might work is for the state governors to undertake such a task. They might even be persuaded to work on the reform structure together, even though the policies and programs that would result would necessarily, and hopefully, follow their respective middle-of-the-road liberal and conservative philosophies. Governors have the knowledge and experience to know how to do such a thing, and the reality-based contact with electorate that would keep their ideas within-the-rails and somewhat popular. I can’t think of another entity that would stand even a remote chance of successfully instituting such radical changes as I am suggesting.
Are these pie-in-the-sky hopes on my part? Certainly, but we are not getting anywhere with the present system so why not try it.
The suggestion of such an approach can come from anywhere, even me, but it would need a champion on each side of the philosophical divide, working together, to make it happen. Unfortunately, such messiahs would seem to be in extremely short supply.
If you have any other ideas, please let me know and I will happily support and publish them. Thanks.
