On the Nature of Political Parties.
POSTED BY: Fremdfirma
UPDATED: Friday, August 3, 2007 23:18
VIEWED: 1557
PAGE 1 of 1
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy....
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose; and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those intrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.... If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield.
George Washington, 1796.
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I remember reading this somewhere before. I'm no great scholar of our electoral system, but I remember thinking how unjust the two-party setup was in the past.
I'm not sure it bothers me as much now. Granted, the actual establishment within both parties have a lot of control over the candidates that will be representing them, or I assume they do. Do people get vetted somehow when they decide to choose a ticket? Does somebody have to verify them, or is it just a matter of who the parties give money to?
I just don't know if any other system would be any different beyond appearance. It will still really just be about money in the end. It seems like at least in theory, people could use either party to build up a new face at the grass-roots level.
In our current primaries we have quite a spectrum in both parties, from hillary to Kusinich, and then the outlier Gravel who sounds more liberetarian, and from Huckabee to Paul in the Republican party. It also seems like 3rd parties never do anything more than play spoiler.
I would not vote for Nader because of that. If Nader got himself on a democratic primary ticket, then maybe I'd put my vote towards him...maybe(I don't really know much about his positions).
I did hear of one idea that was pretty interesting though, that might actually open up the viability of 3rd party candidates, and diminish the grip that the 2 dominating parties have. It was some sort of priority voting system. Everybody would choose a primary and secondary candidate. This might actually be in use in a country, I'm not sure. If your primary candidate was way too low in the race, your vote would default to your second choice, or something like that. This would allow people to feel like they weren't just throwing away their vote when they went for a long shot. Probably unlikely though.
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That's called IRV, or Instant Runoff Voting, and of *course* they'd never allow it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
God forbid us peons actually have any say in running our so-called "representative" government, golly gee, we might actually dare to actually vote in someone not part of the established elite nobility, and then where would we be ?
The only way John Q Public is gonna get his say back is with the fourth box, and I think it's time we admitted that.
-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it
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A little long but kinda relevent
This talk was delivered on June 1, 2007, at the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Conference on "Restoring the Republic: Foreign Affairs and Civil Liberties."
There are two clear and present dangers to liberty in America. One is known as the left, and the other is known as the right. They are dangerous because they seek to use government to mold society into a form they seek, rather than the form that liberty achieves if society is left on its own.
I'm going to assume that the left and the right come to their views sincerely, that their passion for using government is driven by some fear that the absence of government would yield catastrophe. So the burden of my talk today will be to identify and explain the common thread that connects the worldview of the left and the right, and suggest that they are both wrong about the capacity of society, whether it is defined locally or internationally, to manage itself.
Let us begin with the question: why should we have confidence in the notion that society can develop on its own, that it contains within itself the capacity for self-management? Another way to ask the question: why do the advocates of leviathan believe that the members of society are incapable of achieving cooperative engagement in the absence of the state?
The discovery of this capacity for cooperation was the great intellectual contribution of the classical liberal school that gave rise to the American Revolution. It grew out of a belief that whatever imperfections social self-organization had, there was nothing that centralized government could do to improve it. They took the daring step of tossing off the rule of the state in favor of complete self-government. They didn't fear chaos. They looked forward to liberty.
This event was the product of the liberal idea, as held by most all sectors of society. Liberalism did not seek utopia. It sought liberty under the conviction that society had a built-in mechanism that permitted individual members to achieve a harmony of interests. They believed it to be true because they lived it. The belief in this harmony of interests was the great passion of the old liberal intellectuals, of which Thomas Jefferson was a leading exponent.
After the revolution, when government began to regroup and reconsolidate, the liberal idea began to gain detractors. John Adams, whom Jefferson beat in the great presidential election of 1800, never stopped resenting Jefferson's suspicions toward power and opposition to practically everything the federal government wanted to do. It was Jefferson's conviction that liberty yielded social cooperation; it was Adams's view that liberty could only be established and sustained through government authority. These two opposing views persist to this day.
Adams went so far as to level a familiar accusation against Jefferson's faith in pure liberty. Adams wrote him in 1813: "You never felt the terrorism of Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts,…. You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genet in 1793, when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day by day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government…. I have no doubt you were fast asleep in philosophical tranquility when…Market Street was as full of men as could stand by one another, and even before my door when some of my domestics, in frenzy, determined to sacrifice their lives in my defence…. What think you of terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?"
So we can see, then, how Shays' Rebellion served the government in the same way that 9-11 does now: it is held up as an example of the kind of terror that will befall us if we refuse to give government the power and money necessary to make the world peaceful and wonderful. What Adams conveniently overlooked is that the rebellion of which he spoke was actually sparked by taxation and government-backed credit expansion. There would have been no need for a revolt had government not created the conditions that led to it.
And so it is with 9-11. It was gove
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My word, Kane espousing Anarchist/Libertarian/Anti-Federalist sentiment, hand me the defillibrator martha, I may die of shock.
Painful tho it is to say, A+ for doing your own homework on this topic, Kane.
-Frem
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Dang, Kane just posted something that's actually intelligent, on topic and thought provoking.
(Checks the sky isnt falling.)
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I'm sure there's a bit of a spectrum that encompasses leftist liberals like myself, but that speech certainly mischaracterized my own position numerous times.
First, and most importantly. I don't trust government to make good decisions for us. Faith in a big daddy government is not at all what me or most American liberals believe in. We believe that government is an extention of the people, and that the people should never stop paying attention to what their left and right hands are doing.
What I am hopeful of, is a government that actually does represent the people, because the people are paying attention, and to real information.
As a liberal, I don't want to take our governance out of our hands...I want us to govern. But there are forces that serve to weaken our ability to do so.
As a liberal, I take to heart Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They make sense to me. The American people need to govern. Therefore they need the fundamentals provided to them so that they can make healthy decisions.
As a liberal I am torn by states rights versus those of a central government. Some states are more conscienable towards their residents than others. I can be happy I live where I do and just hope things work out for them, but in truth our states are ultimately at the mercy of them as well. Matters of public educaton and matters of labor should be handled by the central government because states with governments that devalue the public will damage the public's ability to be capable and active voters.
I'm not being elitist. When people have less time to worry about public affairs because they're too worried about getting food on the table, or when people are informed that man coexisted with the dinosaurs after god created the earth in a public classroom, what kind of intelligent decisions can we expect them to make when they vote for a candidate, if they vote at all.
Granted, when folks like George Bush and the republican party gain power, then I become a renewed convert of states rights over federal. I appreciate the push and pull here to some extent. I remember Madison and Jefferson's campaign for states rights after the alien and sedition act was passed and I'm grateful to them.
Ultimately, I think with a working education, with enough humanitarian governance and motivation, we may not have to face a George Bush in the white house.
And I'm not talking about education as propaganda, by the way. I'm really talking about education as teaching the basics of how to solve problems and the importance of being curious.
........
I love that part in the speech about the employer employee contract. Like that exists without government oversight. Hell, even with government oversight and consent, we have companies yanking pensions of people who thought they had a "contract."
What kind of regulation under the auspices of "old liberal" ideals would exist? Or will we really just sort it all out ourselves.
I'll submit here that by voting in our public officials, and by demanding of them they act on our behalf, that is how we sort this out ourselves.
Wasn't it government regulation that put an end to shanty towns and forced a living wage? Wasn't it government regulation that busted up trusts? How do the people tackle a corporation? What contract exists between worker and employer if the worker has no real options? Eat a little or starve is not a choice. Big business displaces competition for our labor.
I assume outsourcing isn't a problem in the pure liberetarian view, because to do something about it would be government regulation?
I assume massive disinformation at the hands of the marketing engine we know of as the 4th estate is nothing we can't handle without using our government either, and what's wrong with a snazzy, streamlined internet anyway?
.............................
We agree on alot of the current problems with our nation. But the liberetarian view looks at government as only capable of evil. That just doesn't represent our nation's history fa
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I disagree with a good bit of that, mind, although you state your case eloquently and have actually thought it through, thus I will not flame you.
And it was violence, rather than regulation, that put an end to many corporate antics, recent posts have delved heavily into that topic.
But you nailed it over the fence for sure in a single sentance.
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My view looks at government as a tool. A really fucking dangerous tool, like a circular saw. Pay attention to it, and you can make some nice lines, turn away and you might lose your thumb.
That is very much true - but actions of that very government have put a big curtain in between us and the saw, so we cannot see what it is doing, and then outlawed any notion of pulling it aside.
Awful hard to make judgement calls and "pay attention" when they hide every possible bit of doings or decision making behing the veil of "national security".
Look up *how* COINTELPRO was exposed, which lead to the Church Committee, which lead to FISA, which was then, completely ignored.
You proceed under the false assumption that the Government actually obeys the rules they set for us peons, and that is absolutely not the case.
And trusting them to self-enforce is neither wise nor effective.
Government power is much like The One Ring, regardless of who wields it, it serves only one master, has only one cause, and will almost inevitably corrupt it's wielder, save in the rare case of having no means to do so.
-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it
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Problem is you're advocating for a cycle that can only end with violence. Companies will push until finally, a desperate and enraged public stands up and does something violent in response.
Companies will also be capable of their share of violence, and worse, they'll have the money to pay for armed security, plants that incite violence, etc.
How bad does it always have to get before it gets better under this vision?
........
You're right about government placing a curtain between us and the saw. That's unacceptable. That's something we do have the power to impact though, or would if the will of the people were behind doing something about it. People are pushing every day with freedom of information requests...laws have been placed on books for the sake of requiring disclosure in numerous matters. That the curtain is winning out is not a result of our action upon government, it's the result of our inaction upon it.
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Another long one , but again relevant. It's a speech given by Lew Rockwell this past April.
This talk was given at the Houston Mises Circle on April 14, 2007.
During the 1990s, many of us complained bitterly about rule by the left. We were outraged at how the Clinton administration had so much faith in government’s ability to bring about universal fairness and equality. Government, we were told, would make right all relations between groups, equalize access to health care, curb every corporate abuse, and stop all forms of exploitation of man against man, and man against nature.
Except that behind every regulation, every bill, and every central plan, no matter how humane it appeared on the outside, an informed person could discern the iron fist of the state, which the Clinton administration freely used against its enemies. Clinton himself was perhaps never as convinced of the cure of power as the worst Clintonites, but it remained and remains his default worldview.
What was wrong with the leftists’ worldview in the 1990s and today? Essentially it is this: they see society as unworkable by itself. They believe it has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can't solve.
If the conflicts they want are not there, they make them up. They look at what appears to be a happy suburban subdivision and see pathology. They see an apparently happy marriage and imagine that it is a mask for abuse. They see a thriving church and think the people inside are being manipulated by a cynical and corrupt pastor. Their view of the economic system is the same. They figure that prices don't reflect reality but instead are set by large players. There is a power imbalance at the heart of every exchange. The labor contract is a mere veneer that covers exploitation.
To the brooding leftist, it is inconceivable that people can work out their own problems, that trade can be to people's mutual advantage, that society can be essentially self-managing, or that attempts to use government power to reshape and manage people might backfire. Their faith in government knows few limits; their faith in people is thin or nonexistent. This is why they are a danger to liberty. We knew this in the 1990s, and we know this today.
The remarkable fact about the conflict theory of society held by the left is that it ends up creating more of the very pathology that they believe has been there from the beginning. The surest way to drive a wedge between labor and capital is to regulate the labor markets to the point that people cannot make voluntary trades. Both sides begin to fear each other. It is the same with relations between races, sexes, the abled and disabled, and any other groups you can name. The best path to creating conflict where none need exist is to put a government bureaucracy in charge.
And yet, the left is hardly alone in holding this essential assumption about the way the world works. We have lived through six years of a Republican president. The regime is dominated by a different philosophical orientation. And we have thereby been reminded that there are many flavors of tyranny. Bush's spending record is far worse than Clinton's. After promising a humble foreign policy, war and war spending define our era. We're told that every problem with war can be solved through more force, there is nothing necessarily wrong with imprisoning people without cause and without legal representation, that torture can be a legitimate wartime tactic, that some countries have to be destroyed in order to be made free, and that we can have all the warfare and welfare we desire at virtually no cost, thanks to the miracle of debt-driven economic growth.
Traveling on airplanes reminds us how much freedom we've lost and how we have become accustomed to it. Government bureaucrats presume the right to search us and all our property. We are interrogat
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I hope Lew wrote both of these or someone is guilty of Plagerism.
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He did indeed....
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laws have been placed on books for the sake of requiring disclosure in numerous matters.
Which are almost universally ignored, look at FISA, look at the rejection and defiance of the Subpeano process, the outright contempt at even the thought of compliance with the rule of law, in our current regime.
You are dealing with folk that will not only hold YOU to the rules, but heap more abitratry and vague ones upon you to prevent your interference - at this point you could consider the Girl Scouts a band of "Terrorists" by the letter of the law.
One does not walk into a card sharpers place of business, and play by HIS rules, with HIS deck, on HIS table, and expect a fair game, and this is what you are doing when you depend on the rule of law to be self-applied by folk who have utterly no respect for it.
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How bad does it always have to get before it gets better under this vision?
Bad enough that it is more profitable for the corpos to cut a deal than continue the fight, simple economics.
Look at the history of strikes and strike breaking that I posted in another thread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strikes
The corpos in almost every case went screaming to the state to break the workers FOR them, in NO case did the Gov come in substantially against the corpos, and in essence the government used it's power to *crush* workers rights, rather than support them - but because of folk willing to continue the fight in spite of bloodshed and imprisonment for wanting a square deal, we now have SOME few (often ignored) Labor Rights.
The Rule of Law does not always function as intended, and sometimes one must stand against it in a greater cause - were that not true, we'd still be a British Colony, and we're not.
What our Founding Fathers did was "illegal" and "an act of terrorism" by the letter of the law, but it was what was "Right" as well.
Men make Laws to protect things, but when those Laws become more important than, or even an anethma to, the very things they were intended to protect, then those Laws have no value save as a tool of oppression.
Sometimes you have no option but to play rough, our Founding Fathers acknowledged that, it's why we're not supposed to have a standing army (The Constitution was intended to forbid it) and why the second amendment exists.
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."
Thomas Jefferson.
I'm not, even tho it may seem so, 100% in disagreement, just saying that any expectation for the Gov to clean up it's act without threat of violent force behind it, is foolish and ineffective - to be frank, what is a protest march but in essence, the threat of a violent riot ?
Without that threat, your entreaties will fall upon deaf ears every single time.
-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it
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Thanks Frem,
I agree with alot of what you've posted, while we still disagree on certain points.
I'm not convinced that relying on mob response to corpo mistreatment is going to yield great results, though point taken about companies running to the government that is in their pockets, for backup.
If we have to rely on our tendency to mob when things get bad, then we can also expect a lot of unfortunate scapegoats to be the first targets of our frustrations.
And how bad would it have to get before people took action? things are worse than they should be now. That's a condition that could change with holding our government accountable.
.......
You're absolutely right again...the laws on the books are being ignored. The reason they are being ignored is because, contrary to Jefferson's urge that we keep the government ever wary, we have not done so. Our government is not afraid of us because the American people have become either apologizing abetters, jaded nehilists(not that I don't sympathize), blissful ignorants, zealous nationalistic ignorants, or else they've been relegated to the fringes by the 4th estate where they are made to look like loonies.
Even when we see a crime go unpunished before us, we shrug it off. We should never have let Ford get away with his pardoning of Nixon. The American people should have had him impeached for that. We shouldn't have let Bush get away with the shit we know, like bringing back so many of Nixon's inner circle into the white house, a second time. We shouldn't be passively accepting all these broken laws we're finding out about under the bush administration, as simply the status quo of government. We are enabling a corrupt system. It's our baby. Because we don't scold it, it takes what it wants and hits us with it.
Again, no question the laws are inefectual, but we could make them be effective, at least in theory.
ON EDIT
I agree by the way that it was the people willing ot fight for change that made the change occur...not the people in office. But the change effected the laws...effected the status quo. largely ignored? sure. Are we better off with out them? I doubt it. Should we have to tread the same ground time and again, or should we be trying to forge forward. At least a law is a record of some paradigm shift, even if it can be renigged upon.
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If we have to rely on our tendency to mob when things get bad, then we can also expect a lot of unfortunate scapegoats to be the first targets of our frustrations.
Too bloody true, I never understood why rioters pissed off at the apparatus of government then burn down local businesses, it completely boggles me.
That being one reason I'd prefer it not to come to that.
City Hall should be the FIRST stop in such a case, followed by the local courts, but that's not very likely.
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Our government is not afraid of us
Very large part of the problem, yep.
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people" -V
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We should never have let Ford get away with his pardoning of Nixon.
He shoots, he SCOOORESsss.. a big three from half-court
Yeah, that's been one of my pet peeves for over a decade.
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We shouldn't be passively accepting all these broken laws we're finding out about under the bush administration, as simply the status quo of government.
Agreed.
Overall, I dont feel that violence in and of itself is an answer, but without the THREAT of it, effective resistance and/or forced compliance isn't going to happen.
-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it
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