Welcome. Have a seat. It’s time we talked about a subject I’ve been interested in for quite a while and now seems to be a topic that quite frankly should be considered as a certainly obtainable, if not wholly reasonable way to proceed.
I’m speaking of an American democratic and constitutional version of the one-party system. Or, put another way, what if we had just one big organized party, the Democratic Party, to choose from? Could we maintain our integrity as a nation of, by and for the people?
The big question is, when dealing with a “big tent” party, are their enough individual campers under the tent to represent a wide enough percentage of the voting population to insure an inclusiveness of the thought relevant to a big enough contingent of the electorate? My conclusion is the answer would be yes.
Constitutionally speaking, political parties are not mentioned in the Constitution. For the most part, the Founders did not favor America breaking into political factions. They were hoping to avoid the bitter acrimony as part and parcel of politics and policy readily available for all to see in English even today in the modern Labor/Tory dichotomy.
No less a figure than George Washington chimed in numerous times in speeches and in writing how he hoped to avoid the same fate for his new nation. George was a Federalist at heart, but chose to run for president with no formal party affiliation. America’s first true independent. He won by a landslide and was re-elected without any true opposition.
Washington wrote that if we were to have two main political parties he hoped they would be identical in philosophy and policy as possible. I believe it is fair to say that his ideal would have been to utilize political parties primarily for finding, teaching and promoting as many good candidates as possible for the office of the presidency, within a set of shared common goals, all of which would be to benefit society.
This is where the Electoral College came in. If in fact, there was a situation where several good candidates were all running for office and could not gain a clear majority, the House of Representatives led by the Speaker of the House, the federal level politician figure thought to be closest to the people, ultimately guiding the process and allowing the legislative branch to choose the best of a bunch of hopefully all ready, willing and able candidates as our next top presidential banana.
However, that scenario is no longer as clean and clear cut as it might have been in a nation of roughly three million persons living for the most part distant agrarian lives without any real methods available to actively campaign or for that matter, even count the popular vote as a purveyor of the people’s preference for president, pickled pepper. Say that ten times fast!
Is the Electoral College still necessary? Only if you believe the Speaker of the House should essentially have the biggest say over the presidential picking process prone to…nope not going there again. You get the picture. Soon, it is my guess that we will abandon the Electoral College.
Why? We simply don’t need it and as of this writing, it has become a tool whereby a minority of a minority, based on land ownership and a bit of state sovereignty have a far too greater say in our elections at the presidential level and down the ballot.
Needless to say, or perhaps it does need to be said, what we experienced over the last four years and still today, was not the Original Gangsta Framers’ idea of a constitutional democracy with representation, aka a republic form of government.
I still believe without hesitation that no matter the amount of crazy, brainwashed and out-of-touch with reality racists and similar vermin came out from under their respective rocks over the Trump years, they never represented anything more than 80% of voters who identified with the GOP, in total making up no more an estimated 20-25% of the total republican associated voting population. This is called minority rule, and safe to say not within the Founding Fathers’ original design for elections under a free society.
Oh, there are those who will argue each state should get two senators as the Founders wanted the smaller states to have equal representation in the federal government. This is false. The smaller states wanted equal representation among the states, the bigger states, not so much.
But along those lines, it would have been impossible for the Founders to estimate with any accuracy the future populations of the various and ever growing list of new states and so, unless you are a big believer in land, sand, cactus and bodies of water influencing our elective processes, we might agree we need to move to a more “people friendly” method of elections.
Further complicating current matters is the continued and completely corruptive influence of money, dark, light and all shades in between in our elections at all levels of government. I continue to posit that Citizens’ United is still one of the poorest and ill-reasoned (assuming there is any) Supreme Court decisions of all time, as it is built on a fallacy, namely the amount of the contribution, along with its ability to access and purchase more media, is “speech” as defined within the parameters of the First Amendment rights to free speech.
It’s not. Primary to First Amendment rights to free speech, is the protection of the content, or the message of one’s speech, not how many times you get to say it and certainly you have no specific First Amendment right to display your speech on as many different platforms to as many different persons as possible, without attention being given to the unique character of an election.
And so, although money does not talk, it did build Fox News as well as many, many other “new outlets” that exist merely to spread lies to the degree we now have one of our major political parties, the GOP, taken over by a fraction of a fraction whose ideology is built on lies, rumor and innuendo.
Conspiracy theories are exactly that. Often based on information (alternative facts) and fabrications that do not exist and therefore can only be validated by resorting to emotions and feelings, not reason, has now created a party that does absolutely nothing to further the political discourse in our society.
Why do we need this? We don’t and don’t let anyone tell you we do for in America the truth still matters. If this is so, and it is, then the only true question remaining towards heading toward a legitimate one-party system is whether the singular party contain enough truthful information to create a wide enough range of legitimate political discourse to cover enough prevailing political views to represent the will and interests of We, the People, no matter which candidate is ultimately chosen.
One party, the Democratic Party does, the other, the GOP sadly, does not. One way to wrap your head around this is to think of AOC as the center, possibly still leaning a bit left of the party. Just because the GOP, the party of no verifiable veracity that I can find, but surely full of cowards who care for nothing but maintaining their power to collect and skim off the top of bribes, portrays her as “radical” or my favorite, a “socialist” as if we were not already a socialist leaning nation, doesn’t mean we must, so don’t.
As a point of policy, there is nothing wrong with you, the average citizen receiving value in funds and services in return for your tax dollars. Nothing. Zero, zip, zilch. Bupkis. Period. Full stop. Moving on. A good deal is a good deal, no matter where you get it, right? As I like to say, money in my pocket is where it belongs. I suggest you do the same.
Unfortunately, the idea of a singular, unified one party system is no longer merely theoretical or conceptual where we can remain complacent. The recent events of January 6, 2021, where a mob of delusional, out-of-touch with reality goon squad turned to violent insurrection in support of a complete fallacy, namely that Donald Trump, won a fair and accurate election that he did not.
In the process, the new GOP showed their willingness to discard with several of the most hallowed of American democratic traditions, namely, the one person, one vote standard and the peaceful transfer of power, all so they could install a racist, misogynist, homophobe dictator who doesn’t like the people they don’t like, and nothing more.
Will the GOP go out of existence? History tells us they already have two feet in their grave. National becomes regional, regional become paranoid, paranoid becomes desperate and then crazy, and eventually untenable to the clear majority of the American electorate. Then, poof. The money dries up and you’re gone.
This is what happened during the Nixon administration and it was only at the last minute the party officials themselves demanded Tricky Dick’s resignation and hence saved the not so Grand Old Party. This time? There are no such Republicans in sight.
At best, we have a gaggle of handwringers who can’t wait to go back to the days of their patron saint Reagan, the racist, religious zealot, creator of voodoo economics that don’t work, who traded with Iran to arm a doomed to failure revolution in Central America, using the CIA to run drugs, against the expressed will of congress, an unconstitutional act for which Ollie North took the fall.
Leading to George Bush I being installed as president. Until he raised our taxes. Until Bill Clinton came into office and balanced our budget giving the USA a surplus for the first time. And then he got a blow job or something silly like that and we lost our tract to the “moral majority” which was never moral or a majority. You know the rest of the story.
Now, we can’t even convict a president for inciting an armed insurrection on the Capitol grounds during which five persons including a police officer died. How can this be reflective of reality? Answer is, it can’t, and it’s not. You want to do all that again? Plus, the Bush/Cheney legacy? I don’t. We need to change, and I might have just laid one possible way out. My advice? Buy the Democratic Ticket and take the ride. Trust me, it’ll be the gonzo.
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