As a political “junkie” one of my main interests is our American Constitution as this link will show.  I was cognizant of the problems inherent in our Constitution when I wrote America’s Greatest Strength Is Also America’s Greatest Weakness,  Our Constitutional problems came to mind this morning when I read an insightful piece by the superb Ian Millheiser at Think Progress.   His article Democratic senator will introduce Trump’s SCOTUS nominee at his hearing. WTF discusses his annoyance at the fact that the Democratic Senator from Colorado Michael Bennet,  will be one of three Senators to introduce Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch at his Senate Hearing on 3/20. Bennet claims he is doing it only as a courtesy to another Colorado resident, but Millheiser (and I) see it differently.  Millheiser describes the fact that Gorsuch is even farther to the right than the radical judicial extremist Antonin Scalia,  though with a far handsomer visage.

Millheiser describes the pressures upon Bennet,  pressures which seem to be leading him away from solidarity with his Party on the SCOTUS nomination. This Court nomination was literally stolen by the Republicans, who literally refused to even give a hearing to Barack Obama’s nominee for SCOTUS.  So when faced with the nomination of this Judicial extremist Gorsuch ,  logic dictate that Democrats should do everything in their power to de-legitimize  Gorsuch and stop his approval.  Millheiser’s piece discusses that viewpoint and rejects it.  Reading the article today though sent my musings into a tangential train of thought, which is that America’s  “Two Party System” is failing us miserably.

When your country has the political reality that any political advance can only be accomplished legislatively via one of two political parties, of necessity each party must encompass a broad spectrum of political viewpoints. Although the Founding Fathers never really conceived of political parties when writing the Constitution and in fact did not like the concept of “Party”, in less than a decade after the adoption of the Constitution political parties began to form. As    these nascent parties evolved they roughly took the form of “traditionalists” (conservatives) vs.  “modernists” (liberals).  For its’  70 years or so, up until the Civil War the United States was an agrarian oligarchy under the format of a Republic.  The party system reflected the differences between the various American oligarchs regarding their vision for the country’s future. Those differences boiled down to those who advocated change and growth of this burgeoning country and those who wanted to maintain the status quo and the socio-economic structure of their forebears.  As time went on these differences became the driving impetus of various faction within each Party, but the Party structure itself calcified into a system which made political change, from forces outside of the two party system very difficult. After all with only two party’s offering choices to the electorate, it made the system far easier to “game”,  for the oligarchs of entrenched wealth.

Having two party’s,  each encompassing an entire spectrum of political views, limits the philosophical and political choices of the party and the electorate.  Stultified leadership structures evolve and the “party establishment”, as humans are wont to do, focus as much on maintaining their own power, as they do on the Party advancing its’ own needs for power. Now there are arguments to be made that in America the two party system has added to the country’s stability and there is some merit to that, especially seeing the rather messy and sometime dangerous effects on a country’s stability in parliamentary Republics.  However, conversely there is a great argument to be made that the American “Two Party System” has served as an impediment to progress in providing all the citizens of America with socioeconomic equality and justice under the law.

For much of our history our “Two Party System” has proven it can supply a good mixture of stability and growth, even though there was a terrible price to be paid if your skin was dark, if you were an immigrant, or if you were born without wealth.  However, we saw that to make the system work what was necessary was a general agreement to abide by the Law and by the traditions of the system.  As long as most members of one of the two parties agreed that cooperation under the existing structures was necessary, than the “Two Party System” could be viable generally, while failing many specifically.  The first great rift in the Country’s fabric came about due to Slavery.  Abraham Lincoln was duly elected President, but the oligarch slaveholders of the South immediately refused to accept the results of the election, leading to revolution and the bloodiest war in our history.  After the Civil War, stability reigned until the throes of the Great Depression threatened again to tear the country apart. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up a conflict between the banking and industrial oligarchs.  It is rarely mentioned now though, but those financial oligarchs went as far as the Business Plot:  

“a political conspiracy in 1933 in the United States. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the “McCormack–Dickstein  Committee”) on these claims.[1] No one was prosecuted.”

One of the central figures in the Business Plot was Senator Prescott Bush, father of one President an grandfather of another President.  FDR survived that plot and even an assassination attempt and went on to create the New Deal which widely changed the economic and social climate of the country.  Among the patrician class, of which the Roosevelt family were charter members,  FDR was never forgiven for his class treason and his New Deal was never accepted.  As World War II began to overrun Europe and Asia,  many in the business oligarchy actually favored the Fascism of Adolph Hitler and an America First Movement burgeoned around the leadership of American hero and Hitler friend Charles Lindbergh.  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor effectively ended the America First Movement and brought us into the war.  After World War II America was clearly the most powerful nation on Earth and assumed that mantle in opposition to the USSR and it proto communist system of government. This “Cold War” with the Russians created an uneasy bi-partisanship between the conservative and liberal factions of each Party and Republicans were content to bide their time and accept the political structures put in place by the New Deal.

Since both Parties were observing political norms and traditions the system seemed to be working up until the 1960’s when all hell broke loose.  The popular Democratic President JFK was murdered early in his term and his speeches which evoked hope of positive political change became bitter memories.  People of Color, recognizing that the former counsel of their elders to work through the system was a failure, took to the streets with a Civil Rights Movement that showed America the true violence, viciousness and vindictiveness that characterized Southern Segregation and Northern racist hypocrisy.  The Movement against the Vietnam War erupted also into the street and the social fabric of the country began to fray. The murders of RFK, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X disabused many leftists, including me, of the notion of American Democracy and the disdain for the “Two Party System” grew when the Democratic Convention erupted in 1968.  The heretofore unpopular Richard Nixon won election on a platform promising peace, as Henry Kissinger worked behind the scenes to  prevent peace in Vietnam before the election.

Nixon actually escalated the Vietnam War, but curiously maintained a rather liberal economic agenda, thus dissatisfying his Oligarchic allies.  While Nixon was forced to resign and his successor Gerald Ford lost his bid for a second term,  the reactionary oligarchs were grooming a champion to regain power. Ronald Reagan was elected on a platform suspiciously similar to the “Make America Great Again” of of Trump and the corporate establishment news declared it a “revolution”.  Not so curiously perhaps, all three major television networks fell under the ownership of conservative minded corporations. The Network News began then to treat each news story with false equivalency. 

So successful was the corporate media in promoting the “Reagan Revolution” and its tax cuts for the rich, slashing social programs and de-regulating the markets that it even got the less than charismatic George H.W. Bush elected as President.  Bush was done in though, despite fighting a popular war on behalf of Saudi Arabia,  because the tax cuts for the wealthy and the inequality of the nation caught up with him.  The election of Bill Clinton enraged the reactionary oligarchs who had begun to believe that control of the government was their right by birth. What made them most mad though was via his political strategy of triangulation which actually turned the Democratic Party into Centrists Republicans. In other words he used Republican memes like small government and less taxes against them.  Republicans spent 8 years and extremist oligarchs tens of millions of dollars to impeach him, but failed.

While Clinton actually pursued Republican Party policies as a Democrat, he may have maintained his Presidency, but severely hurt the Party in the process.  Al Gore’s loss in 2000 had as much to do with the fact that he ran as a Centrist, as it did with the unprecendented decision of an extremist SCOTUS majority led by Scalia.  George W. Bush became President ceding much control to the loathsome Dick Cheney,  who never let civic duty interfere with his making a buck.  Bush Junior had the extreme good fortune to benefit from one of America’s greatest misfortunes,  9/11. Using the support mustered in a bi-partisan manner from a distraught and depressed country, he launched the two longest wars in American history to the profit of the Saudis, the oil cartels and the Military/Industrial/Intelligence Complex (CMIC).

Barack Obama was elected on a quite Progressive platform and proceeded to govern as a Clintonesque lite Republican.  Even Obama’s health care victory was based upon a plan devised by a Republican governor and actually ensured large profits for corporate health care insurers. Yet Obama became among the most reviled Presidents in American history, at least from the extremist Republican side,  simply because of the color of his skin.  The dirty little secret of the Republican Party, ever since Nixon was elected, with his Southern Strategy, was that they appealed to the sizable percentage of Americans who harbor racial prejudice and general bigotry. The election of a Black Man, indeed a handsome, eloquent and elegant Black Man, was an anathema to this group of bigots. It allowed the Billionaire Koch Brothers and their allies to fund a fake, grass roots movement, the Tea Party and from that racist movement take over the Republican party.  It was that Tea Party takeover that paved the way for the election of Trump.

Nothing is of course that simple.  The Democratic Party was controlled by an establishment that adhered to the Bill Clinton’s triangulation and indeed his wife was the standard bearer.  They were too slow to come to the conclusion that Bernie Sanders was quite popular, not for his charisma, but for his ideas of economic social justice.  After all, how could they see Sander’s message as anything but an outlier to their own centrist, pro corporate messaging?  This was the message that got both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama elected twice?  What they failed to see was that while the Presidential ticket fared well, the power of the Democratic Party in the Congress and at State and Local levels was disappearing.

In an America where Citizens United isn’t the Law of the Land,  in an America where the political structures of centuries are honored and where its governmental representatives are not completely beholden to campaign funding from the Corporate Oligarchy the “Two Party System” could remain viable. This is not unfortunately the America we are living in.

Senator Michael Bennet (D) Colorado