We need to dissolve all political parties in the United States. I don’t know how to make this happen. It might be impossible. In their place, I would like to see hundreds of elected officials voting entirely by their own conscience after vigorous discussion with all other elected officials, each of them making their decision independently, unswayed by tribal instincts (and unswayed by the tribally-based money currently gushing through our system). I would like to see each senator and representative voting on each issue independently, not feeling any pressure on Issue A based on how someone else voted on Issue A voting against his or her conscience on Issue A in exchange for convincing another representative to vote against their conscience on Issue B.
What did the Founders of the United States think about political parties? They abhorred them. Here are a few quotes from “What Our Founding Fathers Said About Political Parties“:
George Washington:
[Political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests. . . .Let me now . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party .
- Letter to his “friends and fellow-citizens.” It was published in newspapers throughout the country and later came to be known as his Farewell Address.
John Adams:
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.
-Letter to Johnathan Jackson, 1780.
Thomas Jefferson:
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.
-Letter to Francis Hopkinson, 1789
Thomas Paine:
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.”
-The Opposers of the Bank, 1787.
