For Liberty's Sake: Voting the Party Line

Today, I just finished a long and exasperating argument with a friend of mine. I admit, I started it -- but only because he made the most asinine statement I've ever read in my entire life: "But it's the left side that is doing things right now-a-days." ("left side" meaning "Left-wing" politicians) His support for this statement was that the Left has always opposed "the war" (in Iraq) and they managed to pass some bill that "made it illegal for congressmen to take bribes."

This is not a rant about "the war." This isn't even about why Red Elephants are somehow better than Blue Asses. This is about transcending the single-greatest tool for despotism in America: Blind faith in the party lines.

When the United States was initially conjured, the architects of its design were vehemently opposed to the prospect of political parties. Why? Because their existence is an open invitation to wanton idiocy.

It's a commonly-accepted fact these days: A large number of politicians are imbeciles, crooks, or both. Nobody disagrees with this sentiment but nobody bothers to explore why.

I believe that the biggest contributor to these shameful truths is the existence of political parties.

We've all read the Constitution. If you haven't go away right now. Read it five times over, memorize it, understand it, explore its language and the context in-which it was written. You are hereby forbidden to read anything else another human writes until you have mastered the Constitution itself.

Where was I? Oh yes! We've all read the Constitution. We know how the United States was organized. Those verbose assurances of "checks and balances" all over the place: It's engineered with the express intention of making it impossible to get anything done and much of it (as it was originally written) seems more like a suicide pact than any other legal document written since.

The reason it was designed this way was to minimize the opportunities that any one entity would have to impose its will upon others: Such imposition of will is called tyranny and was the Jet-Propelled BMW of evil at the time of the Constitutional convention. We wanted to reduce the chances that any of the following may occur:
- A single dictator assumes power and becomes like a tyrant King.
- A single group of people (like a church, corporation, family, or ethnicity) impose their elitist rule over people (Inquisition, anyone?).
- A state or confederation of states subjugates other states and declares itself the true ruler of the American continent (like countless Empires have in the history of Earth)

Basically, they wanted to keep any one entity from oppressing another.

A political party is an entity -- like a corporation, or a church. It is a group of like-minded people who work together for shared goals. When you elect a Congressman from any given political party, you are, in effect, electing that political party into office. The elected official will rely upon his/her party to make a great deal of decisions for him/her because he/she owes it to the party: They did, after all, foot the bill for an election campaign.

Ultimately, the political party undermines the entire purpose behind having all those "checks and balances." There is an opportunity for a single entity to have uncontested power when that single entity holds more than a single vote in Congress. Such an entity holds disproportionate power and begins imposing its will with less and less resistance as its tentacles spread like a cancer throughout Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court.

Today, America is not a Federation of United States. The states aren't united on any point except for the fact that they're ignored wherever possible. The people are disenfranchised. It's a feudal state with two great houses vying for the throne. Your vote only matters if you're a member of one of the aristocratic families. Our legislature and executive authorities are not chosen by their real merits but by a tenure secured by kissing enough behind.

So an idiot watches the political scene and sees a member of one of the political parties do something right -- or at least something that makes him feel good. He sees this event and goes: "Hey, that's neat! I think I like this X-party member!" He begins to look for other good stuff that X party does. Before long, his brain is so used to thinking X party is the better of the two, he disregards the merits of party Y -- and refuses to even consider more correct decisions that would lead him away from either.

Saying "it's the Left side that is doing things right" (which is the same as saying that the Right-wing is more right) is a sign of subscribing to party-line politics: It's proof that you'd just piss all over the Bill of Rights if your preferred party advised you to -- it's proof that you've forgotten (assuming you ever knew in the first place) exactly why America has ever been worth fighting and dying for.

The political parties make America sick. They have put Liberty on its death bed -- and happily sound their trumpets of contentious rhetoric to drown out the sound of Liberty's helpless death rattle.

This Bird has become so transfixed on watching the wings fight that it can't fly anymore: Like the guy who watched his speedometer so fervently that he didn't notice the kid he was about to run over. At least he won't get a speeding ticket, right?

I believe that it is every true American's duty to remove the political parties from power. Stop letting them tell us who to vote for. Stop letting them pick our electors for us! Stop letting them strip power from the states and from the people. Stop letting them tell us how to think on every issue -- stop letting them tell us what the issues are!

If ours is truly to be a government by the people, of the people, and for the people, then we'd better start electing PEOPLE (and no other entities) on exactly those merits.