Middle American News

Chilton Williamson, April 2008

he further the state primaries proceed, the more apparent the fractionated nature of the electorate becomes, regardless of party. Both the GOP and the Democratic Party, it is more and more evident, are essentially loose coalitions of unrelated and often antagonist interests, held together only by a spirit of faute de mieux and the constraints of the relentless and inflexible two-party system.

In the elections over the winter, the Republican Party, as I noted in this space last month, fielded a candidate for nearly every one of its vaunted Big Tent factions. The winning candidate is now apparent—and the faction he represents is the least definable of all of them. We might call it the Pig-headed Faction, or the Bush Third-term Faction, or the Faction of One, combining an enthusiasm for each of President Bush’s three major policy failures—open borders, the Iraq War, and free trade—with an antipathy for Bush’s two policy successes, lower taxes and the appointment of strict-constructionist jurists. Not even the desire to keep the White House in November has yet sufficed to bring the other Republican factions to heel; and while some of these, no doubt, will eventually fall into line like ducklings behind McCain, the most principled will refuse to do so, even at the expense of a Democratic victory next fall.

As for the Democrats, the further they march along the way toward their appointment in Denver next summer, the more apparent the rifts among them appear, the deeper and wider those fissures become. It must be obvious by now that a majority (perhaps two-thirds) of Democratic male voters despise Hillary Clinton; also that a significant, though lesser, number are unenthusiastic at the prospect of having to vote for a black man for president. It is similarly obvious that Latinos overwhelmingly prefer a white liberal female panderer in the White House over an equally liberal male representing a rival ethnic group that bears no guilt for the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, and whose preferred agenda would be aimed at affirmative action in the ghettos of Chicago and Atlanta, combined with benign neglect of the barrios of Los Angeles and Phoenix. Still another shakeout has emerged in the course of the primaries, which appears to have separated bullhorn feminists of a certain age (voting for Clinton) from their younger--and saner—professional sistren (voting for Obama) who can’t understand what all the shouting was about, back in the 60s and 70s, and whose advice to the likes of Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug would be to get a job on Wall Street, lose 150 pounds, and have a makeover by Nieman Marcus. Finally, Washington has encouraged an invasion of scores of millions of people from south of the border and elsewhere that has produced a hitherto unthinkable situation in which the interests, influence, and preferences of illegal immigrants are consciously weighed by politicians against those of American citizens. In this way, the illegal aliens have become themselves a de facto American political class, distinct from the citizen class and whose goodwill candidates of both the national parties assiduously cultivate. And beyond these fractures, rifts, and chasms lie all the historic divisions within the party--organized labor versus craftsmen, rural versus city, white-collar versus blue-collar workers, and so forth.

Most striking about 2008 is that, despite the advanced fissionary process affecting the electorate as a whole, the election (so far) has been free of the threat of a third-party candidacy—a catastrophe for the political establishment the Republicans have avoided by fielding multiple sectarian candidates, the Democrats by limiting the field at a relatively early date to two people who are indistinguishable in policy terms, yet as individual personalities seem almost to come from different planets. (Obama from Venus, Mrs. Clinton from Mars, or maybe just Wellesley.) Thus has the third-party itch been soothed, and any consideration of the potential advantages of a three-(or four-, or five-) party race evaded. This is an unfortunate and, in the long run, unsustainable situation, as the fragmentation of the American electorate signifies nothing if not the exigent need for a multi-party system in this country.

The problem with two-party politics in the United States is easily explained.

Under the two-party system as it has evolved in what today is a unicontinental empire (a home country containing the empire within itself), each of the two national parties has become a broad and contradictory coalition of factions, groups, and interests that cannot be considered a proper party at all, save for the sake of the power and convenience of the establishment. Certainly a party representing the most narrow and specific interests is unfeasible, as even John C. Calhoun would have agreed. But the present system, in which each party professes to stand for a wide array of interests that deserve to be split away and bundled into three or four competing parties, permits the Democratic and Republican leaderships to forestall the horrific eventuality by placating the various party elements at election time through pandering and dishonest promises. Obviously, neither Clinton nor Obama can satisfy both the Israeli lobby and the peace movement, McCain the war hawks and the anti-tax Republicans, in the long run. In the short run, however, all three are capable of confecting a rhetorical election-year unanimity in which all interests feel appeased—until after the inauguration. In the end, there are a few relative winners, a great many absolute losers—and no one, ultimately, is pleased or satisfied.

The two-party system in contemporary America does three things. First, it guarantees that American democracy is a fraud, a process of lies and prevarications that takes no interest into account except the politicians’ own. Second, it ensures that the most important issues of state are never debated in public, since no candidate for national office from either of the two national parties can count on--or expect--a majority of his party constituency to agree with him on any matter of real importance. Thirdly, it assures that neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party stands for anything, beyond its ferocious partisan opposition to the other.

The Founders fashioned the constitutional system they did for a country that, in the late 18th century, was a socially uncomplicated society with few competing classes and interests relative to the nations of Europe, where ministerial government prevailed, and still does. European parliaments have typically included a multiplicty of parties, representing a multiplicity interests. The young American republic too had an array of parties, standing for as many interests, or combinations of interests. Only after the War Between the States did these became amalgamated into the two predominating national parties we know today.

In the interests of constitutional government, it is necessary to break down these leviathans into their constituent parts like so many racked pool balls, and allow them to regroup, naturally and by affinity, into a number of new, more honest, and more effective political organizations.###