real independent

The Problem is Party

The end result of over 30 years of research, attention paid to current events, and a 10-month run for high office (U.S. Representative), my book, The Problem is Party, summarizes in 350 or so svelte pages several things:

How the two major political parties corrupt our government every day.
How they gamed our electoral and governmental system for their benefit.
How they use an unrepresentative two-choice environment to divide us.
How party's faux authenticity is based on association with the founders.
How our representative democracy is supposed to work.
How party lies to us about how our democracy is supposed to work, again, for its benefit.

Following is a summary of where my book takes you. Let's start with the question:

How can we fix this?

Americans are sovereign. They can vote for anyone and anything they want to, and it is my goal to convince them to find the horse that escaped the barn and entice it right back in there. Frankly, it would be simple:

— Run for offices as an Independent or support existing Indies who are committed to making our government nonpartisan controlled. If you don’t see an Indie on the ballot, be that Indie. Your country needs you.
— Elect an Independent to office committed to these changes.
— Once in office, the Indies would first have to change chamber rules to remove all power positions (leaders) whose current role is to control other members’ actions and messaging, and to control the body (when in the majority). The Speakers’ position would return to its original ornamental role.
— Next, Indies would need to pass a law banning closed primaries and partisan gerrymandering nationwide, and order the immediate redistricting of all districts in all states according to nonpartisan guidelines.

Once that is done, several things would occur:
1. All members of a body would be equal. All decisions (committee assignments, legislative maneuvers) would be made by majority vote of all members.
2. There would no longer be a brass ring of raw power and control of the body available for any organization to reach for. Candidates for office would have to run on issues important to their constituents, not a party.
3. Legislative activity would bloom as members of like mind on an individual issue would collaborate until they reach a consensus. A coalition would form, producing a majority that would pass legislation. On another issue, perhaps a different coalition would form to pass that legislation.

This can be done by the people with no help from anybody else and despite the obviously-expected pushback by party and their wealthy backers.

Imagine

Imagine if neither political party could grab government power.
— They had no control of our elections — no closed primaries, no partisan gerrymandering nationwide.
— The role of the Speaker of the House was reduced to its rather weak origins.
— All congressional leadership positions banned from each chamber’s rules, equalizing all members.

In such an environment, no party candidate could campaign on his or her party grabbing total control of government power via numerical majorities. Why not? Because those candidates (and the voters) would know that all members make all decisions (committee assignments, legislation pathways, etc.), not leaders doing the party's bidding.

Tribal loyalty would no longer apply

So when the DOJ in the Executive branch finds criminality in a previous office holder, there would be no tribe to protect as a whole. No claims of “This is all politics!” wafting through the halls of Congress and elsewhere.

Party allegiance has neutered so many constitutional and statutorial aspects of our government. Such that when a legitimate investigation touches anybody important in the other tribe, a large percentage of Americans don’t believe it. Because their party’s leaders tell them not to.

Party is a net good, some say

When self-restrained, political parties, like Pres. Washington said, “may now and then answer popular ends.” But when unrestrained, they can do massive damage to our institutions and norms, which are not ensconced in law, but rather depend upon the self-restrain of party and party officials.

As Washington put it, unrestrained parties "… are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

When did party begin to lose self-restraint?

Our political parties have had their ups and downs throughout our long history. But something happened around the Franklin Roosevelt presidency that seems to have led us to where we are today. According to Sam Rosenfeld’s book, “The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era,” party polarization was not an accident.

It began in earnest during WWII as left- and right-wing advocates and politicians expressed aggravation with rampant bipartisanship (oh horror!) getting in the way of them having their way with public policymaking. At the time, you see, the two major parties were widely diversified — the Republicans containing liberals and moderates and the Democrats containing moderates and conservatives.

Both ends of the spectrum, the more hardcore liberals and conservatives, began pushing for the purification of the parties, that being a directed effort at changing them to more liberal and conservative parties, period.

That effort wended its way through the 70s and 80s, with Nixon’s Southern Strategy beginning to change the makeup of the two parties. Then the Gingrich Revolution made purification more aggressive as many life-long Southern Democrats switched to Republican.

Closed party primaries became the essential tool for such purification. It happened mostly on the right (in part as a reaction to Obama’s election) with the rise of the uncompromising Tea Party, but many moderate Democrats were purged as well — again in primaries — like the rise of members of The Squad.

Now, on the right, after descending into the pit of Trumpism, the purification has become less about ideology and more about a personality cult.

Primaries are the main problem. Two small minorities get to choose the two options given to the rest of us. If we had all open primaries nationwide, the purification process would be derailed.

Closed primaries

Party supporters claim that closed primaries are important because they are a closed group and should be able to choose the person to represent their group. The courts have actually supported this viewpoint as long as it is a closed primary we're talking about. The courts have nothing to say about open primaries from a constitutional standpoint.

Back to closed primaries. So what's the problem, you ask? Well, in each one -- the Democratic primary and the Republican primary -- two small minorities of the population get to choose the only two viable candidates (we're told) for the general election. Now, by most polling that is consistently degrading for party, Democrats represent about 25-30% of Americans, Republicans about 20-25%. (By the way, independents -- those who register as nonpartisan -- are a growing trend, about 40+%.)

Again, back to primaries. Why should two small minorities be able to narrow the choices for the rest of us? That's not representative democracy at work. And there are many terrible and illuminating examples.

In the early 2000s, Californians wanted Dick Riordan as their governor. All polling showed overwhelmingly that Riordan would beat the incumbent Democrat, Gray Davis. But the moderate Republican mayor of Los Angeles couldn’t get out of his party's primary. Riordan lost, and Davis easily beat in the general election the hardcore right-winger that did emerge from the Republican primary. And then, of course, we recalled Davis, spending unnecessary millions in the process. But we couldn't get Riordan as governor, like the majority of Californians wanted.

Nearly the same thing happened a couple years later in Connecticut, where Joe Lieberman lost his Democratic primary for re-election to the U.S. Senate. But because that state didn’t have what’s known as a Sore Loser Law, Lieberman could run in the general election as an independent and guess what? He won! The people of Connecticut — all of them — got to elect the person they wanted to office. Imagine that.

Another indication of how unrepresentative parties are

Imagine if, tomorrow, Sen. Joe Manchin changed the capital-letter behind his name from D to R. I know for some of you, that would be earth-shaking and devastating. But think about it. Did any personnel changes occur in the Senate? Nope. Was there a sudden shuffling of citizens from liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning locations, thus changing the constituent views of individual Senators? Nope.

But think about it; everything would change. Sen. Mitch McConnell would grab the steering wheel of the body, Pres. Biden’s future nominees to any spot would be ignored, all legislation passed would be radically different from what might happen today under Sen. Chuck Schumer.

Does any of that sound small-d democratic to you? Does any of this sound like actual representative democracy? No.

This is how parties have gamed our political system for their benefit. They pretend they are representing us. They pretend they support democratic institutions. But party control of government functions and powers is the least democratic feature of our government.

We should fix it. And no, not by adding another party, Andrew Yang (the Forward party)! No parties inside government, period — that’s the solution (it was original intent).

About this website

Real Independent is devoted to advancing moderacy and independence in American politics. Here, you'll find information about candidates considered by the media to be "non-viable" as well as facts and opinions relating to the issues of the day (and some issues that aren't), all from a balanced perspective. Also, we have a few words from the founders about the dangers of concentrations of power like political parties.

About the author.

Excerpt from the author's book, The Problem is Party

Here’s James Madison: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. ... In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

Anything that weakens constitutional restraints on power, anything that undermines checks by one branch over another is, at worst, unconstitutional. At best, it corrupts the well-documented intent of the founders to guard against abuse of power by the people we entrust with those powers.

Over generations of having to deal with parties inside our government, we as a people have become convinced that the corruption of checks and balances by party is normal. We accept party alignments across branches as the way government is supposed to work. We accept as normal, for instance, a president and a Congress controlled by the same party, or a U.S. House and Senate controlled by the same party.

You think such an environment is favorable to checks and balances between houses of Congress or between Congress and the presidency? Really? Did you watch the relationship between the Republican- controlled session of Congress beginning January 2017 and the Republican president in the White House? How about the collusion—yes, collusion—between the Democrat in the current White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress? There are no checks and balances between those branches.

Washington Post columnist, Jennifer Rubin, in an article chastising Donald Trump for “demonizing the media,” even argues that the media is “the best check against power-hungry politicians.”

Uhh no.

The media often does expose public misconduct, sure. But that’s because elected officials from parties don’t do their damned jobs! The media is not supposed to be the best check. The best check is supposed to be members of another branch of government.

Not to diminish how the media has exposed “power-hungry politicians” in the past (Watergate comes to mind). But the original intention and design of our government explicitly authorizes the other branches as “the best check against power-hungry politicians.”

Some believe that a Congress controlled by the opposing party is the best check on a power-hungry president. That’s become a false model that, in our present day hyper-partisan environment, almost always delivers a clown show.