Founders’ political party warning
Our Founders warn us about political party influence on its citizens, but hoped our system of checks and balances would mitigate destabilizing effects. Hold that thought.
Back four decades ago, generally speaking, if you were a conservative Republican you voted to protect individual rights, for accountability both finically and morally, and work towards a Federal government playing a smaller role in state and local governments. If you were a progressive Democrat, you voted to protect individual rights and for legislation at Federal and State levels to provide a moral safety net to help citizens with food insecurity, healthcare, education, and housing.
Again generally speaking, politicians were listening to the citizens they represented in their districts.
Since then, political parties have seen an exponential influx of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” money from lobbyists and ultra-wealthy donors. Money/power has created political conflicts of interest resulting in the decay of decorum and decency between political parties. Parties twist the truth to galvanize citizen distrust of the other side, thus casting the shadow of “Us vs Them” evil.
This brings me back for our Founders warnings. George Washington cautioned the divisive influence of parties leads to “subversion of the power of the people”. Alexander Hamilton labeled political parties as a “fatal disease”. James Madison in Federalist 10, warned how parties are a threat to our republic. Benjamin Franklin, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Jefferson’s stark warning should an oligarch government take control, the working people “(M)ust come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four … and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread…have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”
So here we are today, our politics has turned from debating policy too rabid identity demonizing, breaking constitutional norms/rules, inflicting retribution on rivals, and attempting to re-district our already heavy gerrymandered states to further weaken the power of the people… all in an escalating political party tit for tat power struggle. Constitutional pillars protecting individual freedoms are being ignored and our Country is morphing from the defender of liberty around the world to a country of “Us vs. Them”.
Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s ominous speech decades before the Civil War, “There is even now something of ill omen amongst us. I mean that increasing disregard for law which pervades the country — the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passion in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice. The disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours … it would be a violation of truth to deny.”
Yes, I needed to read Lincoln’s words multiple times, but he saw the ill omen of self-destruction from within, and therefore it would be a violation of truth for me to not speak up. This moment in time is paradoxical for me, “We the People” will come to the aid of any person regardless of party hat, race, or religion because they know 99% would do the same for them, yet we let our mindsets be corrupted by others to see evil in others.
The Founders’ did their personal soul searching, it’s time we do the same.