Think outside of two-sided box
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Give me Liberty
Rodger Williamson
For more than 150 years, every president of the United States, as well as every governor of Alabama, has been either a Democrat or a Republican. Just two political points of view.
The same is true, as well, for almost every other political office that one can imagine. Left or right alone, without any consideration for any other possible political dimension.
The current two-party-only system that dominates the politics of our state and federal governments is so pervasive that most Americans take it for granted as the only way that they know of.
Given their dominance, one can conclude that the two-party system stems from our constitutional roots, but you would be wrong in that assumption. Virtually all of our founding fathers shunned the idea of political parties and worried about what might happen to the country if political parties ever dominated our nation.
Shortly before the end of his second term, George Washington, with the assistance of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, drafted a letter to his “friends and fellow citizens” that was published in the “Daily American Advertiser,” a Philadelphia newspaper, on September 19, 1796, and later reprinted in papers throughout the country. This letter later became known as Washington’s “farewell speech.”
The letter had three main principles, which were Importance of Unity, the “Worst Enemy” of Government – Loyalty to Party Over Nation and the Danger of Foreign Entanglements.
A full third of Washington’s speech warned us that, “through the course of time cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men would subvert the power of the people and seize for themselves the reins of government (the elected committeeman) through private associations.”
He went on to tell us that once they seized the reins of power, AKA the committeeman, the parties that would arise would:
(1) destroy the very engines (the political process) which have lifted them to unjust dominion,
(2) destroy the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities,
(3) open the door to foreign influence and corruption, thus the policy and the will of one country will be subjected to the policy and will of another,
(4) serve to organize division,
(5) ruin public liberty,
(6) stifle, control and repress,
(7) foment occasional riots and insurrection,
(8) kindle animosity of one part against another,
(9) put in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of the party elite,
(10) agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,
(11) undermine the Constitution which could not be directly overthrown,
(12) distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,
(13) drive the spirit of revenge,
(14) leads to despotism.
Washington concluded, “…parties are truly your worst enemy.”
George Washington was not alone among the founding fathers regarding their views on political parties.
John Adams wrote in a 1780 letter to Johnathan Jackson that “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1789 letter to Francis Hopkinson that “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a political party, I would decline to go.”
Thomas Paine wrote in his letter addressed to the “OPPOSERS of the BANK” and published in the “Pennsylvania Gazette” on March 7, 1787, that “Party knows no impulse but spirit, no prize but victory. It is blind to truth and hardened against conviction. It seeks to justify error by perseverance and denies to its own mind the operation of its own judgment. A man under the tyranny of party spirit is the greatest slave upon the earth, for none but himself can deprive him of the freedom of thought.”
Over that last 150 (plus or minus) years, we have allowed the two dominant parties to institutionalize themselves into our political governing systems, at a cost to all other political possibilities. Both the Republicans AND the Democrats are given preferential access to votes and the distribution of votes among legislative committees, and financial laws are manipulated to their favor, things that are not accorded to third parties. And even though all political parties are legally considered to be private associations, we the taxpayers are stuck with the bill every election year to fund BOTH the Republican AND the Democratic primaries.
The majority of “We the People” feel that we are not truly represented by the partisanship. Recent polls show that most Americans overwhelmingly eschew any specific party affiliation, identifying themselves mostly as either independents or moderates.
But there are also so-called “third parties,” most notable amongst them, and growing quickly, are the Libertarians who aspire to the principles of liberty and freedom as espoused by our original founding fathers.
I cannot say to you that I know of the best way for “We the People” to regain control of our political systems from these two giant parties, but it is my hope that we can elect individual persons from the many differing third parties in order to break up the two-party majority, so that we as Alabamians, and as well as all Americans, may finally live up to the aspirations of our founding fathers.