Resolved: The US needs at least two political parties that can reliably be trusted to hold power without driving the US constitutional settlement into a ditch and risk civil war.
Query: What are the names of the two (or more) parties?
You’d think that this would be an easy thought experiment. What do you think is the percentage of the US population who couldn’t readily name two parties they fundamentally trust? Has that number been going up or down over the past decade?
The Quids and the Doughfaces.
That is, steadfastness vs the bitter deception of moral disengagement. Or in the words of John Randolph of Roanoke, “providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries.”
Current factions only please.
I don’t think Pelosi and Schumer, for all their terrible policy ideas, are threats to thd Constitutional order. Nor are the traditional union movement types, since they know they need a functioning economy to survive. It’s the more local machine Dems, in combination with Alinskyite True Believers, who are the menace. So Obama with his leftism plus Chicago gangsterism, and younger California Dems with their nearly Maoist totalitarianism influences, and public sector unionists, are the danger. And they’re pushing us closer to the precipice because they don’t think the rest of us will ever reach a breaking point, because in their experience we never do.
Either the Democrats can be trusted with power ever again or we’re in need of a new center-left party. Either the Republicans can be trusted with power ever again or we’re in need of a new center-right party.
It has been obvious for some time that the senior echelons of the Democrat Party are evil, and the senior echelons of the Republican Party are stupid. But the problem is not the Parties, the problem is us! We keep on voting for a bi-partisan Political Class which exploits and abuses us. There are far too many people who vote for one Party or the other out of tribal identity. Add in gerrymandering and too many “representatives” are effectively selected by small numbers of party members and then given jobs for life. They are NOT representative!
Since the Parties have used their ability to write the Laws to dig themselves deeply entrenched positions, we are unlikely to see either Party collapse — and the barriers to entry for any new Party are significant. If we wanted to change the situation, we would have to start with some fairly dramatic modifications to the Constitution — changes to eliminate the emergence ever again of a semi-permanent Political Class (going much further than term limits) and the end of universal suffrage. But nothing will change until after the bankruptcy of federal, state, and city governments becomes impossible to ignore.
Two trustworthy parties? As in, “can at least be arsed to do their predation out of public view”? I’m not seeing any…
I am, however, beginning to understand how the citizens of the Weimar Republic felt when the Reichstag, pulled every-which-way by a dozen parties who were more interested in doing each other in than running the country, ceased to become a functioning government.
Hopefully we can avoid what happened to them after that…
We are really pretty much stuck in the early phases of the Second American Civil War.
Both branches of what should be referred to as the UniParty have forgotten a critical set of details.
1.) Every society has some form of Social Contract that holds it together.
2.) If everybody is not bound by the same set of rules, accepted by everybody under that Social Contract, that society collapses as soon as enough people realize that following the rules means failure because of the inequality. The game is rigged.
3.) For us the Social Contract is the Constitution and equality under the Rule of Law.
4.) When those who rule us openly act as if they are not bound by or covered by the Constitution and rule of law, it means that the Social Contract is gone.
5.) There is no intermediate step between a working Social Contract and violence in any society or culture. If you void the Social Contract, there will be violence until someone prevails to establish a new one. The terms of the new Contract may be neither equitable or free, but it will be enforceable.
Subotai Bahadur
“The US needs at least two political parties that can reliably be trusted to hold power…”
I don’t know of any working political party anywhere that could be so trusted. (“Working” to exclude splinter parties that never held office.) Political parties are like governments: necessary, but always to be monitored strictly.
The level of trust that I’m talking about is at a very basic level, trusted to hand over power to their opponents when they lose an election.