Dear America,
This last election manifests a point I have been making for years; the denominations "Republican" and "Democrat" are no longer functional designations of political philosophy. They are no longer utile as rubrics for sorting out our democratic preferences, and since that is the case, our democracy--small d--is jeopardized by them. We are not a nation broken down into the abstractions constituted by those party names. We are a nation divided into two essential camps of sentiment: conservative and liberal. Certainly there are millions of us who are neither, but none of us, or at least none of us who would admit it, want anything other than democracy, and no one would admit to thinking that anything but a republic would serve our democratic aspirations. Thus, the party names, Democrat and Republican, tell us nothing about candidates for public office, much less about ourselves. It is time for a change from Democrat and Republican to Progressive and Conservative respectively. Everyone should be able to tell who is who in politics so that we can make appropriate choices when we go to the polls, and let's not kid ourselves. Within each party, the political malapropisms that the parties names are in the final analysis taint even the primary selection process, so national elections like the one this November do not offer us what we might have selected if only our preliminary process for selection...the party primaries...had been broken down into like minded groups. If we had had liberal and conservative parties for this election, Bernie Sanders might have faced Marco Rubio, and then the nation would have actually made a choice about its direction instead of deciding to wander into the future guided by a capricious, narcissistic demagogue who made a bunch of promises to his faithful on which he now probably will have to admit that he cannot deliver. In addition, we probably wouldn't have the collateral damage that Trump's appointments and nominations for high offices within his administration will certainly constitute. Jeff Sessions will be the antithesis of what southern Democrat Lyndon Johnson was. General Flynn will be the anti-Powell; though he won't fill the same office, he will be the military influence at the heart of the administration. And Steve Bannon, he may well be the anti-Christ, given the sway he seems to have over the nihilist Donald Trump. We are in deep trouble, my friends, and it is largely because we haven't been calling things by their right names since the Whigs joined with conservative Democrats to form the Republican Party. That happened in the post-Civil War period, and we haven't rethought it since. It's time.
The duality in this country isn't between two contrived names, and I say contrived because neither party stands for what its name purports. The parties names are arbitrarily chosen and not even symbolic anymore because at least in some historical sense, they are suggestive of the reverses of what they actually mean. Republicans don't want central government to be dominant over the state governments and Democrats do. What Republicans do want is a conservative, now retrospective bent in our society that central government fosters with institutional ennui allowing them to do what they want with guns, for example, but not letting the majority of the nation have, also for example, same-sex marriage, which that majority advocates. As to the Democrats, they don't want an emphasis on one school of political thought or moral creed, but they eschew the militia mentality and the libertarian didacticism of the sanctimonious right in favor of individual rights guaranteed by a central government universally in light of the fact that the individual states and municipalities can't be trusted to do so. Progressives want the future. Conservatives want the past. And those two rubrics make that distinction clear.
Our parties names should constitute an overt, comprehendible, transparent taxonomy of national political thought, and one looking on at the election process should be able to tell what every candidate is by his or her party affiliation. There should be no guessing as to whether one is voting for a conservative or a progressive since there are progressive Republicans...at least to one degree or another...just as there are conservative Democrats, like the "Blue Dogs". But since we are all "small d democrats", and of practical necessity, "small r republicans", we need to know who is who on the basis of philosophy rather than by virtue only of partisan identity. So, since Donald Trump wants to "drain the swamp" and eschew political correctness as well as the official party under whose banner he ran, let's encourage him to precipitate the change. My feeling is that everyone should know who everyone else is, so maybe the man who's philosophy no one can identify will be the one who makes that possible.
Your friend,
Mike
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