Need rise an indy american party?
Ben Everidge for Thomas
(Disclosure: The author is a former Democrat of more than 30 years who actively participated in national politics and political campaigns and is a registered Independent since 2012)
Back to our founding …
Our nation’s Founding Fathers feared political parties in America, so much so that they did not directly provide for them in the United States Constitution as they did for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government.
The state of affairs between Republicans and Democrats today attests to the wisdom of visionaries like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Franklin, and Hamilton, to name a few, to be concerned about the potential destructive power of political parties.
Parties, or factions as the Founders called them, were considered corrupt relics of the British system that we waged independence from in attempting to form a truly democratic form of government in America.
Alexander Hamilton, most recently of Broadway fame, considered political parties the “most fatal disease” of government. In Federalist 10, James Madison, the father of the American Constitution, regarded factions as an anathema to a “well-constructed Union. Factions, he argued, needed to be controlled and broken of their tendency to violence.
On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, our role model at this mediazine, saw factions or parties as natural extensions of men by their very constitutions, perhaps confirming centuries ago that women should indeed lead the United States government. Jefferson was the professional diplomat of the group, you might remember!
George Washington was so concerned about factions potentially undermining American democracy that he was the first U.S. president to populate his cabinet with a team of rivals, something Abraham Lincoln would do in another very threatening war theater in later times.
Washington consciously chose to appoint Thomas Jefferson as his Secretary of State and Alexander Hamilton as his Secretary of the Treasury despite their obvious and acrimonious differences in how government might best serve its citizenry.
Ultimately, Jefferson and Hamilton promoted and established two competing political parties. Jefferson had his Democratic-Republican anti-federalists, and Hamilton had his central solid government, Federalists.
The political attacks from these opposing factions were certainly vicious and counterproductive to American democracy, to say the least. The political skirmishes led to resignations, firings, a brutal and historic deadly duel, and two centuries and a half of arguments over how strong or how weak the U.S. government should be.
When our founding president voluntarily retired back to Mount Vernon in 1796, he counseled his citizens to be wary of the dangerously divisive influence factions – or political parties – might have on the workings of America’s version of democracy. Washington warned that “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”
Not a century later, the disunion that George Washington feared nearly broke up our nation as northern states mortally battled southern states over various issues, some of which we still struggle with on American streets, in neighborhoods, and in places of business today.
Washington, the man, not the city, worried that if parties flourished in America, they might keep fighting each other, ultimately ending the Union we had come to love and need.
Are we there now? Are the two major political parties destroying America today from within?
thomas invites you to Read:
Hamilton and Jefferson
The U.S. Constitution
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We cannot balance our federal budget, defend American elections from foreign interference, vanquish a novel coronavirus, keep manufacturing onshore, negate the growth of Chinese naval forces in the Pacific, assuage terrorism on U.S. soil, quell religious or ethnic division, and many other challenges.
Our current president promised to build a wall across the US-Mexico border to keep immigrants out of the United States, only to see most of the world now refuse a perceptively weakened American entry into their own countries.
Our current president has undermined our government's separation of powers and the rule of law for personal and political advantage.
Our current president has dismantled institutional and military alliances that have successfully flourished since the end of the Second World War.
Our current president has stoked division between classes of Americans that will take decades to neutralize.
In other words, the United States of America is at a tipping point politically, morally, and ethically. We are not great right now. We are challenged.
We can be great again, but not under the current circumstances.
If we are to survive as a viable and thriving nation, it might be time for the rise of a third party in America. This party can navigate the divide between Republicans and Democrats, as well as Republicans and Republicans and Democrats and Democrats.
A third party who will focus on executing political collaborations that will:
Contain and manage COVID-19 for all nations, all peoples, and all communities worldwide.
End division and animosity between Blacks and Whites, Hispanics and Asians, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, the poor and rich, the middle class and new class.
Rebuild trusted alliances to provide for more robust security at home and abroad, financially and militarily.
Balance our exploding annual deficits and ultimately reduce our burdensome national debt.
Address climate change and empower innovation and manufacturing onshore.
Ensure judicial neutrality and fairness and foster our treasured rule of law.
Remake our nation’s infrastructure and provide sound, sufficient, and readily available jobs for those who want to work and progress.
Give every American access to affordable, rational healthcare and an education system that educates at K-12 and college and trade levels.
Provides a dependable safety net for those who unexpectedly need it and an immigration policy that enables citizenship opportunities in this greatest of nations.
It is constitutionally sound and predictable, centered on the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans wherever they may be found.
A political system that is celebrated by the center-right as well as the center-left and able to fend off the extreme rights and lefts of our political tendencies
In other words, perhaps the time has come for us to establish and cultivate a political party focused on empowering each of our citizens, not just some.
A political party, you might say, that wants us to be the United States of America!